Remixing the Internet?

I think everyone now realizes that we are in the age of the fragmented Internet, the widgetization of everything.

To me, Netvibes is the poster child of this widgetization wave. It’s the one to watch.

But, it was made clear to me recently, mostly after playing with a particular app that I was promised would launch this week (sorry for the tease) Scrapblog, that, despite the claim, Netvibes is not ‘Mixing the Web’.

Netvibes is ‘Rearranging the Web’, yes, allowing us to grab (self-contained) pieces of our online world and bringing it to one place. That drum, I have been beating for ages.

But, the next Internet is not about widgets, but about truly ‘mixing the Internet’. It’s about bringing those pieces together and then exchanging the bits and pieces (hidden in those morsels, those widgets), in the way I want them to be.

This is not about mash-ups that some geek dreamt up and offered to the world, but more along the lines of Yahoo Pipes – for the masses.

That’s mixing. That’s getting all the pieces of my online life and having them mix and match and become a new something that the individual pieces (sometimes served in widget-sized morsels) were not.

While widgets are well suited for the mobile morselization of life, getting those pieces to interchange ‘stuff’ is a challenging design issue but also very helpful to the mobile lifestyle. Such remixing on mobile devices has been on my mind for some time, but now it has hit me much more clearly.

What do you think?

Update: Scrapblog did launch today. Hooray. I can see many ways this app is great and will do well.