157 weeks agoI wish I had a wishlist

I like offloading every task I could to computers. I like such apps as electronic to-do planners and wishlists. I use wishlists at imdb.com, discogs.com, amazon.com and anidb.info. Each one uses its own implementation, and each one has good and bad things going for them but they share one common flaw, they are separated. (This not the kind of 'atomicness' I like :-)). This got me thinking how would it work in a perfect world? Let's presume all of the mentioned websites present data in some common format, preferably something akin to one I described yesterday. Then a third party can keep my wishlists just as a bunch of tagged urls, pretty trivial, huh? There are a few quirks however, I want my wishlists to be 'rich', to expose some specific bits about items listed, for that we need this third party to 'understand' what is being listed. And we can't have it now exactly because we are lacking this common, semantically described format. If I want to automatically group items by director (might also include books by the same guy), or year of release (here all kinds of items can be mixed together) this surely requires some semantics. (Another RDF bashing moment ;) -- triples are an obvious way to store such information, aren't they?) We also need a way to get things into this wishlist in the first place. I think this is the task that belongs to the client software. I imagine it could function this way: I find a "wishlisting service" and set up an accout with it (or authorize with my OpenID, perhaps). Once logged in I see a listing of datatypes supported by this service, each has a checkbox next to it and a button on the bottom that says "I want to be able to track items of these types". I check boxes next to "music", "book" and "movies" and press that button, the server then sends a file to my browser that suggests it should "spice" pages up when viewing items of selected types, my client software confirms this with me and saves it somewhere in it's configuration. Next time I view a document of type "movie description" (not the movie itself, mind you) the page also has a button "Add to wishlist" or marker "In wishlist" in case it is already there. I think it could as well be a menu item or anything else depending on my preference. Wouldn't you love it? And how many new possibilities would this enable! People would start experimenting with various UI approaches to managing wishlists, smart "might also be of interest" services and such. I am sure a thousand of things we can't predict now would emerge in a matter of weeks. This way data would be free to travel (but only when you wish so) from service to service. And don't forget that this "wishlisting service" could as well be a local application.

Questions?