One of the things that have annoyed me over the years has been applications that have no real customizability. Sure, in many of these you can switch features on and off but for many apps, adding a feature that would make the app easier or more effective to use was either not possible or required laborious macros using language subsystems that were overkill for the task at hand (for example, consider using Visual Basic for Applications to write macros for, say, Excel … even simple enhancements always seemed to turn into coding marathons).
Anyway, what has happened over the last few years with the move to Web-based applications is that the architecture of browser-based user interfaces makes many of them easily modified or extensible in the browser.
For example, you can use products like iMacros (Firefox and Internet Explorer) and Greasemonkey (Firefox only) to automate and manipulate any kind of interaction with Web content. The latter product, Greasemonkey, has hundreds of free user-created scripts that allow you to do things such as have ads automatically removed from Yahoo mail or sort your Netflix queues according to various criteria (ratings, alphabetical, etc.).
This makes customizability much easier although it does have the downside that such improvements can be “fragile”; a minor user interface change can “break” the customization.
Recently there’s been a noticeable growth in another type of enhancement of online applications that has third parties providing packaged customizations that are far more robust and add significant functionality. These products and services hook into one or more online applications through published APIs and use those services to add value to your data in another application.
So, today, I have for you two great examples of services that use technique to great effect.
The first is Rapportive, a free Firefox plugin that integrates with Google’s Gmail and displays information about the originator of the e-mail message you’re currently looking at.
Rapportive does this by adding a column on the right side of the Gmail display and showing the sender’s picture (if it can be found), with data from their LinkedIn profile, their Twitter presence, and their Facebook page as well as providing the opportunity to connect with the sender via any of those services. You can also leave notes for yourself about the sender (e.g. “Don’t forget his birthday on the 12th”) which is really useful if you are seriously “working” your social network connections.
The other example I have is a relatively new service that I love: Noteleaf. To use Noteleaf you simply allow the service to have access to your Google Calendar and LinkedIn accounts and when you schedule a calendar event, Noteleaf goes into your LinkedIn account and looks for data on the names used in the schedule item.
The data on these people is then added to the comments field of the appointment in Google Calendar giving you some great prep for your meeting.
Even better, Noteleaf will send you an SMS reminder just before the meeting which includes, for the identified people, their picture, LinkedIn data, a link to your recent Gmail exchanges with them, and, if your calendar entry included the location of the meeting, a link to Google Maps.
This is a genius idea! It’s like having an assistant that never misses providing you with the information you need to be prepared for a meeting.
Mark my words; this type of Web application enhancement of data is going to quickly become a big trend and will, in turn, have some interesting effects such as making people pay more attention to putting their details on line and making sure the data is accurate.
I highly recommend both Rapportive and Noteleaf … they are both not only really useful but they are great examples of how the Web of the future will behave.
