Tools Tools Tools - this is one word you can’t ever use with a VC. You mention tools and they tune out.

I’ve been tracking the evolution of tools for a while now, as the web appeared, as countless tools companies cloned the Adobe and Macromedia models (and failed) and as on-line tools have caught up with the functionality of traditional desktop based tools (can you believe its taken Adobe THIS long to finally come out with an on-line Photoshop?)

But on-line tools have something desktop constrained tools will never have. Community.

And now that we have two-way APIs + community + content - tools nowadays are truly a new paradigm when compared to what we were building in the 80’s.

I used to simply say: “tools today aren’t shrink wrapped, they come with community and built-in help from your peers and they can be updated immediately and can adapt to the times - in a much more timely manner. Tools can output scalable content and you can try them out first - before you have to buy them.”

But we’ve gone beyond just those simple statements.

Tools today are needed to keep track of all our personas, profile accounts and relationships.

Tools today are needed to organize, manage, backup, synchronize and interoperate your digital lifestyle worth of content and ultimately DO the data portability.

Tools today need to seamlessly fit into the mesh - and be designed to edit any element of the mesh - in any way, shape or form. These tools will take the shape of node adjusters, structure editors, feed filter mechanisms, attention data auctioneers, on-going sync managers or just plain old outliners. These new kind of tools are all ABOUT the mesh - and they’re going to facilitate making the mesh a reality.

So Tools are a key aspect of my design of this series of “How to build the mesh” blog posts and we can now see how all the pieces of the puzzle can come together. As long as we design our tools to work with multiple personas, take advantage of persistent ubiquitous content, tag and index structured content and include a Live Web aspect - tools of the future will create a new business model which has not been possible up until now.

Because users first interaction with new tools nowadays is done - for free - unfortunately most people have a hard problem then seeing ANY value in the tool - even after it has become an intrinsic element of their everyday lives.

It amazes me that people would spend $40 on a bottle of wine or videogame or a tank of gas - yet they wouldn’t pay $40 for a essential tool which improves their lives. This is partially because so many of the tools and services out there today simply suck - and lack any depth or value beyond a single feature or gimmick.

But REAL tools have to be:

- flexible, general purpose and able to be applied to a wide range of tasks, functions and application areas

- have a wide range of features and support traditional tool features, like ‘Save as…’, ‘Open’ and ‘Undo’

- be accessible to beginners, while also providing the depth advanced users demand

- be compatible with open standards as well as a wide range of proprietary protocols, data formats and APIs

How many on-line tools that you know fulfill these simple requirements? Not many.

Beyond just wide range of features, tools today also suck because they are designed to only do one or two things. Its as if “simple” dictated the application usage. Well that may work for a screwdriver or hammer - but many of the tasks and applications areas that need tools today ARE complex scenarios and challenges. So the tool BETTER be able to solve the problem, cause this KISS shit just don’t cut it - 9 times out of 10.

Tools today are a single feature, rushed out to market, which remain in Beta and never really get finished.

Tools today are ad driven which is fine, but that forces them to cater to the masses, ignoring the very specialists who really need tools and who are willing to pay for them.

So tools in general have gotten a bad cred - and rightly so. So its time to change that!

Take a look at a tool called ‘webOutliner‘. It was created by Marc Barrot with help from Doug Baron, Danny Goodman and myself. Though still a bit unstable, this tool should give everyone an idea of what is possible - today (it’s actually four years old.) It has ‘open’, ’save as’, a file directory, supports RSS and OPML and combines the old school functionality of outlining (MORE, Think Tank) with web links, media, hyperlink transclusion and structure editing.

Best of all Weboutliner feeds on a very basic UI notion of outlining and hierarchical editing. Instinctfully one hits the carriage return and gets a new node. If you hit the tab key - the node indents. And if you select a node - you can turn it into a link or attach media to it. It works the way you’d expect a web based outliner to work.

So too must our text editors, video and audio editors, or image editors work in this same instinctual manner.

Now combine this desktop-like editing capability with a community of peers.

Now we can have a marketplace to buy and sell assets and resources only your peers can appreciate. Now you can “reach out” to your community and ask them a question that only your peers can answer. Now you can build in relevant content into the tool - which actually HELPS you out in your everyday tool usage. RSS feeds, editorial content, targeted ads, affiliate deals, knowledge bases and deep databases of video Help - can all enhance and multiply what an on-line tool - is.

So community + content is possible with tools.

Now how will two-ways APIs further amplify and multiply this opportunity? Simple - it gets rid of ever having to lock-in your customers into the tool.

Sure - your customers CAN lock themselves in if they wish. But they won’t HAVE to. One will be able to go to a particular tool, use it - and then go back to what they were doing - leaving no residue, formatted account, attention data tied to your name, or other forms of ‘lock-in’ which currently is REQUIRED of ALL on-line tools.

Two-way APIs mean that once you’ve grabbed - lets say your photos from Flickr, Picassa and Plum and edit them into some aggregated album, you can then send that new album back “from whence it came”- and leave NOTHING in the tool.

This kind of flexibility and power will be standard functionality in tools of the future. And as long we we’re smart about designing these tools to work with the mesh - I believe we’ll be able to charge a decent buck for the tools - assuming of course you’re charging via a tiered pricing scheme.

So in conclusion:

two-way APIs + community + content = tool

Final note: no chart or list of issues for this one. Now onto UI Objects!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 10:30 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.