Without a doubt, the web is going beyond the browser. This is actually the name of a bundle package, which I believe expires today, that features the Watson, Spring, and NetNewsWire applications for Mac OS X.
I love NetNewsWire (I'm using it to post this entry, in fact). I've tried Spring, but have very little use for it. Watson... I've tried Watson on and off for a short while. Watson was Sherlock 3 before Sherlock 3 was. These apps (Watson and Sherlock) are forms of Web Service clients. They have many channels which grab web data - sometimes from XML/HTML scraping, sometimes from actual Web Service calls - and wrap it up in native widgets. This allows, for example, being able to browse movies at local theatres and to get showtimes and even QuickTime previews. It's similar to what we're seeing in the iTunes 4 Music Store experience. In iTunes 4, the contents of Apple's music store can be browsed using the familiar native column view widgets of Mac OS X. Song listings show up in a table view. Navigational breadcrumbs show up as a new type of native button widget. But other visual data, such as artist pages or a header bar for album/search results, is HTML. It's an interesting blend. Similar in ways to Microsoft's strategy, but Apple (so far) hasn't chosen to make everything look like a web page.
It was because of iTunes that I decided to take another look at Watson. I remembered Watson's Amazon module being really fast as a result of using Amazon's web services API's. I downloaded the latest version of Watson and started playing around. The Amazon module is indeed fast. It presents a column view of Amazon's categories to browse around in, and results load quickly. I had forgotten about Amazon's magazine subscriptions section until I saw it in Watson. But after the Apple Music Store experience, I started wondering - when will I be able to subscribe to Harper's via Amazon through Watson, without going to the browser?
