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Building the web OS
Last night, Andre Torrez released TK Pal to very little fanfare. In his words:
TK Pal is a snippet of PHP code you can place in a PHP enabled page to restrict access to content to TypeKey users who have specifically paid [using PayPal] to see that content.
Skip the debate over whether or for-pay content is a good idea, and marvel at what Andre has done here.
Let’s say you run a weblog about design, and you want to experiment with charging a minor fee for a white paper you put some serious time into. Previously, there was no really good (i.e. quick) way to do this that didn’t require some manual labor anytime someone made a purchase. But now, with little trouble, you can give it a try — it’s modular, elegant, and free!
(That manual-labor scenario is using PayPal to accept money, then emailing out the file or a password to access the file.)
Apart from the coolness of what TK Pal can do, I like it because combines two successful web services to create a third valuable service. We are seeing increasing interaction between web applications every day, and the results are often astounding. Just as I believe people will increasingly rely on a suite of online services to facilitate their computing tasks, I also forsee greater integration between these services.
The internet itself (and the web, significantly) is a conglomeration of services, most created by geeks for the public good, and governed by formal or informal standards. Where commercial services interact (or they interact with the non-commercial services the ‘net is built on), it’s largely because they have to. Play our way, or go home.
(That’s pretty much why Internet Explorer supports web standards to a decent extent, by the way.)
But more and more, businesses are opening their web services up voluntarily so that cool things like TK Pal can exist (and for free, no less).
Major corporations like Amazon, Google, and eBay see the value in doing this. Smaller but significant players like Six Apart and Ludicorp (Flickr) obviously see the value. By making their services transparent (whether that is an implicit or explicit goal), they are providing in-roads for other developers.
Which is how Andre Torrez can tie TypeKey’s authentication services to PayPal’s financial services and make something cool happen.
Similar things are happening at every level, from the bloggers (who include del.icio.us links or Flickr photos on their sites) to the developers (who integrate DropCash with MovableType or iPhoto with Flickr). I think this is just the beginning.
Forget the Google OS — we are well on our way to a viable Web OS. It may never have the grandeur of the semantic web, but it will have lots of small pieces, loosely joined.
Have no doubt, 2005 will be a great year for web applications.