Miles Efron and I have written about micro-IR in the past (see here, here, and here), and I recently came across another interesting example in the form of the Houzz App for the iPad. Houzz is an interface that fronts a collection of photographs of house interiors, the kind of stuff you might find in magazines and interior design/decoration books. It provides (an imperfect) browsing and search interface to find images by geographic area, by room function, etc. It also has a mode which brings together sets of images on a theme, curated by a designer with a blog. Each set of images comes with an introduction by the blogger, a bit of background on the person, commentary on each image, and even blog-like discussions among readers and designers associated with each theme.
The quality of commentary varies, but what’s interesting about the application is the integration of web-based data (which can also be accessed via a web browser) into a much nicer viewing and browsing experience tailored for the iPad. Houzz brings together multiple sources and user-generated content, and helps people navigate and organize that information.
As capabilities of mobile platforms grow, we should see more and more of these kinds of vertical applications replace or augment their web-browser equivalents. The web remains the source of much of the data, but the browser loses its central role as the mediator of interaction.
This is probably good for people: web-based interfaces typically offer sub-par interaction due to a variety of constraints and design choices, whereas applications (particularly those controlled by design guidelines and tailored to the capabilities of a particular platform) can often offer a much better user experience.
On the other hand, the next logical step in the evolution of these applications is to share data among multiple applications, something that Apple guidelines currently prohibit. But as John Battelle points out, Apple is not likely to retain that policy indefinitely: the economic pressures will be too tempting to resist. It will be interesting to see if they manage to circumvent the kinds of privacy issues that have been plaguing Facebook while allowing data sharing to benefit both users and service providers.