I was starting to get a little discouraged about the new apps being launched lately. They all seem to be so “me too” and narrowly focused. That is until lately.
I’ve recently been hacking around with a couple of applications, or platforms if you will, that look really interesting and got my creative juices flowing: Twilio and Trello (and yes, they sound a lot alike but that’s just a coincidence).
Twilio provides infrastructure APIs for developers to build scalable voice and text messaging apps. Think of Twilio as cloud-based telephony. They’ve built a very easy to use and flexible platform for developers to dream up all sorts of applications. It took me a while to “get it”, but here’s how I see it: Twilio approaches telephony from the perspective of what a user wants to do. It’s not really for making simple telephone calls – although it can do that – it’s more for building integrated and interactive apps that use telephony as a feature. I see this user-driven approach as refreshing from the traditional telecommunications company.
Trello is a very flexible, multi-purpose collaboration tool. Two things really impress me about Trello: first the incredibly responsive and dynamic interface. The developers, Fog Creek Software, have deployed the latest bleeding edge technologies to build Trello: node.js, Coffeescript, WebSockets, MongoDB, HTML5 and CSS3. I can make a change on the screen of my laptop and see the change propagate to my iPad in less than a second. No need to save and update. Trello gets me dreaming about the whole new generation of web apps that these technologies could spawn.
The other thing that’s impressive about Trello is its multi-purpose functionality; you could use it for anything from keeping a personal todo list to managing a complex business process to building a house to designing a new product. Trello is working on an API and I could envision integrating Trello with other business applications.
Hopefully you’ll share my excitement.
What new platforms have you looked at lately? I’d love to hear from you.
-Chris
