I believe the palm pre did this like, 5 years ago. Nobody was excited about it then. The concept with the PRE was: Instead of having apps, you have cards- bits

I believe the palm pre did this like, 5 years ago. Nobody was excited about it then. The concept with the PRE was: Instead of having apps, you have cards- bits of content, that have some chunk of functionality attached to them by virtue of their type. So a contact card has contact stuff on it. A web page card has browser stuff on it. It's a kind of abstraction that allows some new kinds of interaction like, arbitrary sorting of cards, searching through cards, shuffling, etc etc- Making the content itself more like a file icon. Or conversely, bringing more of the content and app functionality into the freedom of movement of a file icon. There's no concept of "opening" a file in an application. The file is just there, with everything you need ready to go. This new incarnation has to do with facebook and twitter's inclination to actually retrieve the contents of a user supplied inline link to try and show a "preview" inline, so you're not just clicking into the link blindly. The twitter card concept is about giving the people at the destination of that URL some control over the appearance of that twitter preview- by the use of metadata/microformats-like markup. This level of control is starting to approach the uncanny valley of resembling the above Palm-Pre-like card concept; turning the preview into the app functionality itself.