Microapps for Fun and Profit

The future of the web is tiny. We are moving from an era of big, monolithic web sites to small web services being stitched together endlessly in new, innovative ways — small pieces, loosely joined, to use David Weinberger’s phrase. These tiny pieces of the web can be thought of as “microapps“, and MicroApps.org describes the philosophy in greater detail:

MicroApps are small REST applications that are designed from the ground up to be integrated with other applications. Usually, they are not directly useful on their own, but must be integrated into other applications (this is what differentiates a MicroApp from a regular REST application).

And further…

The core idea of Microapps is basically using the web (and REST specifically) as a component architecture to build applications. A microapp is a small application with a very tight focus that can be integrated with other microapps or other web applications via HTTP and a common data format (usually XML, JSON, or RDF).

Don’t worry about the technical details about REST architectures and data formats; the key point is that microapps are small pieces of functionally designed to be put together into larger applications. But if you browse the list of existing microapps, something strange becomes apparent. The vast majority of these microapps are not hosted services, but rather Plain Old Software, which you download, install, configure and manage yourself. These tools would be far more valuable if made available as public, hosted web services. For one, the potential audience would be vastly larger, expanding from the relatively modest set of developers with access to their own web servers running Python, to, well, just about any web developer at all. Secondly, a lot of collective effort could be avoided if each new user of a microapp didn’t have to install and manage the software separately. So what’s the problem here?

Erik Kastner gave a presentation at RailsConf 2008 called Microapps for Fun and Profit. He defines three categories of motivation for someone to create a microapp: “fun” (play, learning), “profit” (AdSense, donations, sponsorship), and “better than money” (reputation, your personal brand, experience). Erik also makes reference to “microprofit” (seen in the snip of one of his slides above), and this hints at the barriers to turning microapps into fully public, hosted services.

Coming up next: why there aren’t more microapps, and what we can do about it.