A few years ago when the iPhone was just starting out, there used to be a marketing tag line that went "there's an app for that." Now that there are literally hundreds of thousands of different apps, there really does seem to be an application for just about anything that you can imagine. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to link these various apps together.
One of the reasons search engines have been so successful is that they take the chaos that is the world wide web and help to simplify and organize it into digestible chunks. You don't have to be an expert about every topic under the sun. By crawling the web, sites like Google and Bing do the heavy lifting for you to return relevant search results. There is no such entity linking apps together. At this point, there are all kinds of data and information inputs in all of these apps, but nothing linking them together.
This article from the New York Times discusses this gap: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/06/technology/tech-companies-look-to-break-down-walls-between-apps.html?_r=0
Here is an introduction to the issue:
Navigating the Internet used to mean painstakingly typing the exact address you wanted into your computer. The web browser and the search engine simplified that, giving us the Internet we take for granted today.
Now, across Silicon Valley, companies from tiny start-ups to titans like Google and Facebook are trying to bring the same simplicity to smartphones by teaching apps to talk to one another.
Unlike web pages, mobile apps do not have links. They do not have web addresses. They live in worlds by themselves, largely cut off from one another and the broader Internet. And so it is much harder to share the information found on them.
It is not just a matter of consumer convenience. For Google and Facebook, and any company that has built its business on the web, it is a matter of controlling the next entryway to the Internet — the mobile device.
The major companies are hard at work on the problem:
Take Google, which makes money helping people search the web. When people search in apps, it is mostly left out. And while the company has a fast-growing business selling apps through devices that use its Android operating system, that pales in comparison to its business selling search advertising.
Google’s solution is App Indexing technology, a way to catalog app pages, letting Google’s search engine retrieve information from mobile applications as well as from web pages.
Still, there are major challenges:
With so many companies and investors working on deep linking, the competition has become a problem. That is because the easiest way to get apps to link as if they were part of the web is to get app developers to adopt one standard that would work across devices and operating systems.
“Once we’re all using the same plumbing, everyone can go and build businesses and interesting experiences on top of that,” said Eddie O’Neil, a Facebook product manager working on the company’s program, App Links.
The app problem traces its origins to 2008, when Apple introduced the App Store for iPhones. Unlike websites, apps were set up to be separate little boxes whose technology prohibited them from interacting with one another. At the time, the idea of a phone full of apps was new enough that most people were not very worried about whether those apps could link to each other. But today, apps have begun to eclipse the web. Americans spend about half of their time online using mobile apps, according to comScore, a digital media analytics company.
It will be fascinating to watch as our mobile world morphs and changes over the coming years.
No comments:
Post a Comment