I’ve been struggling to communicate with others what the new Internet ecosystem is made up of and it hit me a few minutes ago.
They are Internet Connected Components.
Hear me out.
When you go to Kayak Buzz or ZVents, what do you see? Two ICCs. One is a Google Map. Another is a AdSense bar.
When you go to Dave Winer’s blog, what do you see? One ICC. It’s the Community Directory on the right side that points to an OPML file somewhere else on the Internet.
When you go to Gabe Rivera’s blog, what do you see? One ICC. It’s the Memeorandum box that you can put on your own site.
When you go to Caterina Fake’s blog, what do you see? One ICC. It’s the Flickr bar to the right side of her blog.
When you go to Naked Conversations, our book blog, what do you see? Two ICCs. One from Amazon and one from Google.
Visit my blog here and you’ll see one ICC: FeedMap.
OK, that’s what I’m going to call these things from now on. What do you call them? Web Services doesn’t seem right. Web Parts, no, that’s what Microsoft calls Sharepoint things. JavaScript components? Hmmm, I guess they are. Gabe calls them “Widgets.” Nah, those have other contexts. Doesn’t OSX call their components for their desktop “widgets?”
Flickr calls them “bits” but you can’t search Google or MSN or Yahoo for “bits.” There’s hardly any listings at all for Internet Connected Components, though.
The Virtual Earth team calls its ICC a “MapControl.” Google’s map team doesn’t call them anything. You just call their API. Yahoo’s Map team just calls their ICC an API.
Microsoft is branding its Internet Connected Components as “Gadgets” and that’s OK, but I think we need a non-branded name to generically refer to these things. What do you think? What do you call them when you’re telling other Web developers about these objects? In fact, calling them Internet Connected Objects makes sense too (and there’s even fewer hits on Google and MSN for a search on that).
By the way, anyone have a directory of ICC’s?
Update: Ethan Stock calls them “rawpotatoes.”
