More on Apps and Links

First, the venerable Dave Winer started it off:

The great thing about the web is linking. I don’t care how ugly it looks and how pretty your app is, if I can’t link in and out of your world, it’s not even close to a replacement for the web.

A couple false premises here, first that linking is the only way to connect things, and secondly that apps exist to replace the web. Both aren’t true.

Matthew Panzarino responds to Winer:

It’s not strange to imagine a system that will allow you to quickly tap on a link in one app that launches it in another, allowing you to bring along data you may have been working with.

This already exists, though not in the wide open way the web currently works, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Matt Sherman rightfully asks, “Why can’t mobile apps have URLs?”

Guess what? The tile has a URL, pointed to a specific place in the app. Now, I haven’t dug deeply enough to know about the security boundaries, but it seems to me it would be a small step to allow the app to register a namespace on the phone (app://appid) and expose endpoints to any other app.

Exactly.

Posted December 13th, 2011 11:13 PM
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  • http://twitter.com/weblivz Steven Livingstone

    Hi John. 

    I’ve thought about the idea of mobile apps having links before but i just don’t see everyone doing it the same way and is a move away from the native html5 apps (never mind native) that may need to change to be customized to work the way one platform does it from another. It’s hard enough getting the basics working across devices.

    I think that mobile apps will be what Flash is to the web – a significant but nevertheless niche in he overall web of things.