Stephen Downes is Wrong? Is It Really Cool?

After Stephen and I recently lamented in our blogs about the problems with comments getting buried (see How Do People Interact with Blogs and Stephen's comments) - now I'm completely throwing away all blog norms because I don't want my response to Stephen on a different topic to get lost.

My recent post - Incredibly Cool! Vision of Future of Application and eLearning Development - Stephen responded:

OK, I know why Tony Karrer is calling this "incredibly cool," but no, it's not, it's a mess. I know it seems really cool, because it brings so much stuff into a page. But I couldn't put my mouse down n it anywhere without clicking on something, windows would stay open, I have tabs piling up on each other, and through all of it I couldn't find anything useful, and there was no place to actually create anything. We're not there yet - Web 2.0 is going to be, more than anything, simple, not a horrendous desktop mess.

I just have to respond to the "it's a mess" comment. I agree with Stephen that right now this stuff is early stage and it's a mess. I'm not planning on using that particular tool anytime soon. It's more of a toy than anything else. Oh, I am using something similar to create my personalized home page. And, none of that is the point.

The point I want everyone to take away from doing the exercise in the original post is the ease with which you can pull together an application made up of services being provided by separate entities and the ease of doing this authoring of your home page through a web interface.

You need to use a bit of imagination, but picture the objects on the left as a series of Question Types and Interaction Types that you can drop onto your page. This is authoring 2010. And the components may come from places other than your authoring/LCMS vendor. And they can easily include interaction with your learners.

That's all I'm saying. :)