BASEMENT.ORG

I think we're going to start to see an interesting side effect on web pages and blogs as content and services become more granular. Content providers, the Yahoo!'s, AOL's, publishers, magazines etc., will start to provide their content, in a dynamic form, for placement on other web pages.

This goes beyond adsense and such. It's more a highly targeted yet fully plugged-in view of content. As data and presentation continues to separate, the "big bite" aspect of the web will give way to this more targeted approach. Today, I visit My Yahoo to just get the weather or a sports score.

Yahoo! and others are already delivering that content in a more discrete format. Their desktop widgets are already fueled by such services. Techcrunch just recently gave a glimpse of Yahoo!'s upcoming finance widget.

It's pretty neat stuff and I think it's implications are more than subtle. As content and services get delivered in such ways, we (the users) will have to travel less from destination to destination. This is part of the promise of portal pages like live.com or Netvibes. Pick what you want and put it on your own portal page. But the implication here is even greater. Other content creators, most notably bloggers, will be able to tap into third parties for content as well.

People have talked about the value of separating presentation and data and the flexibility it affords. There hasn't been a lot of talk about slicing vertically and delivering these smaller, bite-size pieces of functionality. As simple API's and technologies like RSS continue to propogate, and as developers start to think in the context of discrete services rather than web pages, the Web is transforming into a Bite-Size Web.