The massive proliferation of web services, their corresponding APIs, and the notion that “the web is the platform” has caused me to spend a lot of time in what I call “horizontal land.” This is a special place where software that nits everything together (sometimes nicely, sometimes not so nicely) lives. Our RSS theme and corresponding investments (FeedBurner , NewsGator, and Technorati) arose from one aspect of this problem.
Shortly after I started thinking about the implicit web several years ago I hooked up with Eric Norlin. We bounced a bunch of thoughts around and Eric proposed the idea for what became the Defrag Conference . We had the first one in 2007 – I thought it was superb as did a bunch of other people. As a result, we are doing it again in 2008.
As Eric and I were debriefing on the 2007 conference, we realized that there was an interesting layer that we didn’t really address at Defrag. We started calling this layer Glue – some examples follow:
- Marketing Glue: the abstraction of the management of ad platforms into a common interface
- Enterprise Glue: a “rest-ful” service oriented architecture via mashups and RSS
- Social Network Glue: the movement toward cross-network interoperability and data sharing
- Interface Glue: cross-platform, cross-browser technologies like Silverlight and Apollo
- Messaging Glue: tools that are evolving for meta-messaging
- Identity Glue: reputation, user-centric identity and web single signon
We are now working on how to integrate Glue into our thinking – either as an extension of Defrag or as a second conference. If you have ideas or want to be involved in helping us think this through, please comment or email .