Death to aggregators, Vol. 2

Gareth Simpson quotes an old post of mine, where I wished that aggregators could be more closely integrated into browsers, since most of the time, the aggregator serves as the browser's burly bouncer, figuring out who gets in and who's locked out.

I wrote that in November 2002, and I've come a long way since then, and both the browsers and aggregators have too, with aggregators growing browser features, and browsers becoming RSS-savvy. That's great, because it provides a possibility of eliminating one of the three programs that must always be open for web traffic: the browser, the mail client, and the feed reader.

But even that's just a start. Where do I see this going? In Wired's Googlemania issue, they asked several designers to offer their vision for the future of Google (link). My favorite was Joshua Davis, but it's pointed in the wrong direction. Sure, I care about Edward Tufte, but imagine his Google prototype with you in the center. Here's my web traffic for the day, here are my latest e-mails, here's the day's calendar, here are the 20 or so headlines I'm likely to be interested in. Enter a name in the search box, and you get a results page that includes address book info, appointments, recent e-mails to and from that name, and web search results on the name. All a program needs to know about to do much of this is RSS, POP/IMAP, and search engine interfaces. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see something very much like this in Outlook 2005 or 2006.

As a Mac guy, I see this as a replacement for the Finder, which again, is pointed in the wrong direction. The Finder is focused on files sitting on your hard drive, but most of the interesting stuff is out there, floating on the corporate intranet or on the internet. How much of your day do you use dealing with files on your hard drive? If you're like me, most of your computer's cycles are spent surfing e-mail, the web, and news feeds. The default view into the soul of your computer shouldn't be a floating hard drive or "My Computer" icon. It should be more of an interactive assistant and newspaper all rolled into one.