For a long time it's been clear to me that Web 2.0 must eventually resolve itself into a small number of all in one place tools. For the last few years many of us have been choosing publishing platforms for our image, video, blogging, bookmarks, calendars, documents ... But that place hasn't always been the same place. For example, this blog is published using
Google Blogger and I regularly include photos stored in Yahoos
Flickr (I could use Picasa but I prefer Flickr). I have sidebar widgets that aggregate my bookmarks from
Faves and my shared items from
Google Reader. But I have other content in other places that can't be easily added to my blog and the blog isn't the ideal place for all my content. What we need is one flexible tool that brings them all together. The
recently released
Google Sites seems to me to be a prototype for the uber-tool of the future. Google Sites is built on tools Google acquired from the Jotspot wiki company. It allows you to bring together content from a wide range of (Google) sources; calendar, docs, spreadsheets.
At this stage I'm just noting my thoughts on Google Sites. I haven't had time to get under the hood and have a play. I certainly have some concerns about how nicely it plays with other systems. I'd hate to think a time is coming when we need to make a choice between one of two or three uber systems for all our bits. But it seems we are one step closer to being able to display all our public bits in one place and that a good thing.
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