Qrowd

Happy New Year! 2007 was a great year, so I hope that will continue into 2008. Cooqy chugged along nicely in 2007, with more and more eBay merchants using the Cooqy showcase widgets to advertise their eBay inventory. 2007 was also busy with many interesting OpenLaszlo consulting projects…so much so that I usually worked multiple projects simultaneously. Any time left over at the end of the day I would work on Qrowd, typically 12am-3am when the house was quiet.

For 2008, I am looking forward to getting Qrowd out the door initially as a private Beta hopefully sometime in January. As companies like Teqlo have demonstrated, the mashup builder space is a hard place in which to figure out what problem to solve. Yahoo! Pipes’ apparently low usage leads me to believe that RSS-only mashups are of little interest by themselves. Microsoft’s Popfly is more of a general-purpose software app builder, yet the apps I have tried are not very inspiring, at least to me. Worse, Popfly and Silverlight are buggy in my experience…when I try to use them I crash or hang the browser, even IE7.

Qrowd will have functionality similar to Yahoo! Pipes and Microsoft Popfly, plus some additional capabilities neither offer. Like Pipes, Qrowd will allow RSS feeds to be mashed up into new feeds. Like Popfly, Qrowd will also provide a general-purpose application builder. Unlike Pipes, though, technically-savvy users who know XML and Javascript will be able to create new system modules that all users can use. In the case of Popfly, Qrowd’s widgets will run in Flash or browser-native DHTML thanks to OpenLaszlo.

I see Qrowd as a foundational technology upon which other higher-level component-based applications can be built upon. One example is the Web 2.0 Start Page like Netvibes, Protopage, Pageflakes, etc. A tool like Qrowd that powered a Start Page would enable a higher level of customization, by allowing more control over the gathering and presenting of web information. Another example of a higher-level tool would be a Performance Management dashboard for enterprises, whereby the ease of data manipulation and presentation customization offered by Qrowd’s visual wiring editor would allow non-technical managers to tweak their Key Performance Indicators without waiting for their IT department to otherwise make coding changes. In my mind, Qrowd is a starting point for building tools that allow a higher level of user customization while imposing a lower hurdle of technical skills.

I’m looking forward to pulling back the curtain. Here’s to a great 2008!