I don't have to bow to nobody!
Until I'm working again, that is. :-/
I just thought of a perfect example of the type of thing I believe Todd would like to see. Taxes and grocery shopping. Huh?
Okay, there are applications -- written for web-enabled refrigerators -- that help you track what food you have on hand, make menus from it, and put together a shopping list for what you'll need. Kind of cool, actually.
There are also applications that help you do your taxes.
What these two things have in common is that both of them deal with expenses. Wouldn't it be cool if the money you spend on your groceries, according to the fridgePod, were automatically debited from your net worth calculation and listed as non-tax expenses? No more duplicated data entry.
Odds are, there are no two such apps that would make this easy for the average user. If they both had the same data model for money, it might be easy to make them work together, so it's a good idea. But if that happens, it's still going to be a programmer doing the integration.
I could give my mother a fridgePod and a copy of TurboTax that are designed with the same currency model, and she would never try to figure out how to make them talk to each other. Unless the installation routine from one app discovered the other and built the connection, hers would remain unconnected.
So yes, small apps with open, standard interfaces are good. Tools that can be easily plugged together are good. Making it easier for developers to create new things is good. But saying it's users who want to plug them together is IMO wishful thinking.
