S60 Open to new features

The Register has an interesting interview with Jon Von Tetzchner, Founder and CEO of Opera (a company said to produce some sort of web browser, I think).

I actually found some of the questions more interesting than the answers. In particular, this one (on the top of page 4):

“There are some interesting applications on Wii - particularly the Orb hack - where people take advantage of the browser to play their own music and view their own the photos. That’s using the browser as plumbing rather than platform…” - Andrew Orlowski

I take “the browser as plumbing” to mean using a browser to provide functionality other than “web browsing” that is usually delivered by purpose-built applications. In the same way, I’ve known people to use a spreadsheet application as “plumbing”, doing some pretty non-spreadsheet-related tasks inside a worksheet, such as writing reports and doing email (really). There are also reports of a strange tribe whose every move is conducted inside emacs, apparently oblivious to its lack of support for Mayan hieroglyphics.

The “Orb hack” is described in another Register article as using the Opera browser built into the Nintendo Wii game console “…to show photos and browse iTunes playlists on the TV.”

This is something that’s always seemed pretty cool to me: using web systems within your own personal “network” of computers, televisions, mobile phones, cameras, and whatnot. There are some other glimmerings in this direction: ZIM is a “desktop wiki”, and if you peruse Google Labs you’ll see a number of examples of web technology put to uses where internet connectivity is tangential to many of the most important use cases. When you’re entering text, for example, it doesn’t matter that much whether you’re connected. Word processing tools presented inside a browser are an example of using the browser as “plumbing”.

Using a browser as plumbing makes viewing data in different contexts very easy. The key may be what this approach does to us: the more we use browsers as engines to explore our personal data, the more we’ll drive that data toward browser-accessible forms and locations.