In Smart Browser, Where Are Thou? Alex calls for a leap in browser technology. Specifically browsers need to stop being stateless and start using all of the data that flows through them. While I think better browsers are part of the solution I don’t think it should all be in the browser (e.g. as Flock is doing.) The browser needs to be a platform that can work with web servers using standard formats of common concepts (links, photos, books, articles, contacts, events etc.) Different servers can support the formats but do different things with the data. For instance delicious, BlinkList and Shadows all have the same data concept (a link) but are blind to each other. BlinkList had to manually implement a delicious importer. Why not a common links XML format that I can store with the service I choose and then easily move to other services. Same idea with photos or contacts (so that I don’t have to build up a new list of contacts each time I try a new service.)
On the links side I’d like to see delicious and co. starting to support MicroFormats. When you save a link that has an event MicroFormat on it then delicious should extract all the data it can and save that link as an Event Type. This starts turning delicious from a list of links into an ad-hoc list of data with URIs. Simply put; you are collecting items.
