Somewhat ironically, the way mobile computing is obsessed with simple 'apps' reminds me somewhat of the 'Unix philosophy' - lots of tools that do one thing, whi

Somewhat ironically, the way mobile computing is obsessed with simple 'apps' reminds me somewhat of the 'Unix philosophy' - lots of tools that do one thing, which you can chain/pipe together into workflows to great effect. I can see this taking off more if vendors and developers work more on simple 'piping' APIs. And other things like RDFs, Service-Oriented Architecture in general. And it could be so much more richer than the usual piping of text that happens in Unix. Imagine, you take a picture with your camera phone; you pipe the image to some sort of visual pattern matching program which isolates the faces in the picture; which are then uploaded to an online facial recognition service and the identities sent back to you; which are piped to a social networking app to find which people list polka as an interest; and then finally to your email/messaging program of choice so you can invite them to your monthly polka event. THEN you can save this workflow and have it execute from just a single camera shot... or have the camera input come from a surveillance camera via bluetooth.