Comments on: De-Portalization http://blog.sezwho.com/blog/2006/12/11/de-portalization/ Wed, 07 Jan 2009 12:02:06 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5.1 By: NitinK http://blog.sezwho.com/blog/2006/12/11/de-portalization/#comment-211 NitinK Tue, 12 Dec 2006 08:55:11 +0000 http://www.youkarma.com/exp31/wordpress/?p=48#comment-211 Great post! Here's another link to add to your awesome list: <a href="http://www.micropersuasion.com/2006/11/why_widgets_wil.html" rel="nofollow">Web 3.0 and the Widgetized Web</a> by Steve Rubel. (In my mind, De-portalization is closely tied to Widgetization - do you agree?) I think you're right - even if the foothills rise, there will always be mountains. But the question is: will they be the same mountains that we have now? [To stretch the geological metaphor, will a tectonic shift level today's mountains and cause new ones to rise? Sorry, couldn't resist! :-)] My point is this: as more and more horizontal services become available through widgets and APIs, as features for existing vertical applications and web sites, users may no longer need to visit the general-purpose web sites of these services - they will be able to do everything right from within the context of the domain-specific applications they already use. Instead of visiting Google for a search, del.icio.us for tagging, Wikipedia for lookup, etc., what if they could live within their particular application (a chemical analyzer or an online shoe store) and access all of these services, just like you use a spell-check capability from within any editor, rather than going to dictionary.com? Such a change could shift traffic from today's horizontal-service mountains to vertical-solution mountains. Just a thought. Great post! Here’s another link to add to your awesome list: Web 3.0 and the Widgetized Web by Steve Rubel. (In my mind, De-portalization is closely tied to Widgetization - do you agree?)

I think you’re right - even if the foothills rise, there will always be mountains. But the question is: will they be the same mountains that we have now? [To stretch the geological metaphor, will a tectonic shift level today's mountains and cause new ones to rise? Sorry, couldn't resist! :-)]

My point is this: as more and more horizontal services become available through widgets and APIs, as features for existing vertical applications and web sites, users may no longer need to visit the general-purpose web sites of these services - they will be able to do everything right from within the context of the domain-specific applications they already use. Instead of visiting Google for a search, del.icio.us for tagging, Wikipedia for lookup, etc., what if they could live within their particular application (a chemical analyzer or an online shoe store) and access all of these services, just like you use a spell-check capability from within any editor, rather than going to dictionary.com? Such a change could shift traffic from today’s horizontal-service mountains to vertical-solution mountains. Just a thought.

]]>