Being CS

Network Aware Apps + Dashboard = Great Combination

Tim O'Reilly is undoubtedly right about the importance in having all applications Network Aware, or even better Message Aware. This would mean that applications would support an interface for sending and receiving messages and talking to other interactions. Users do not want to deal with incompatibilities. It should be easy to use your Word Applications to exchange data with others (similar to Hydra). It should be easy to play Games over the Network (our BattleFungus game will support this), and automatically find out if people on your Buddy List in one Application (or a global list), also use a different application that you are using, so you can use that to connect to them as well. This interaction (finding out if users use different apps that support networking) would be the perfect use for Nat Friedman's dashboard idea. Dashboard can find out the email address of someone on your AIM buddy list, but with some extensions it could also find out if that person has Hydra, and if they have an address where Hydra can connect to them. The same would work for many types of applications.

Even if dashboard weren't used for discovering whether the other person has the application, it would be perfect for managing all the different channels of communication with one person. When you only communicate with someone over Email and IM, it is still possible to keep track of everything. But when you suddenly have 10 different apps that you use to communicate with the same person (exchange pictures, IM, play games, stream music, read blogs), it gets impossible for a human to remember all these interactions. Dashboard would give you all the data about one person in one central place. Extending dashboard and networking applications are two of the most important developments that we will see in the next 5-10 years in computing. The other 2-3 are independence from one computer, distributed computing and increasing bandwith.