Tear Down The Wall...

App World has been slowly turning the internet into a set of walled gardens.  As I've said before

 First Microsoft seemingly rolled Silverlight under the bus in favor of HTML5,  and now Adobe may have done the same with Flash.  This makes a lot of sense given the increasing fragmentation of the web (Apple/Android's Apps are increasingly creating mini walled gardens that have a difficult time interacting with each other).

There has been quite a bit of discussion about this lately, particularly about the need to Tear Down The Walls.  In this vein, Microsoft seems to have a bit of an edge (at least theoretically).  Their mobile paradigm (focused on HTML5 based apps) allows for apps to communicate with each other - the famous example of course being the one where if you search on Bing (ok, Google, whatever) for a movie title, then the search also gets executed against all of your apps, and their results are also displayed. 

Now Kik (of Kik Messenger fame) has thrown their hat in the ring, launching a new, and open, API which allows app communication - between multiple users of the same app, the same users across multiple apps, and all combinations thereof.

From Kik's documentation

The API turns Kik Messenger into a communication channel for you to push content and/or files from one instance of your app (User A) to other instances of your app on other phones (User B, User C, User D, etc). 

The API uses local Intent and URI functionality, which means your app can pass data to and from Kik Messenger easily. Kik Messenger handles all the actual transmission of the content, with the same speed and reliability as our text chat. You simply drop the API library into your library, paste in some code, tweak the parameters, and you're done.

Will this be widely adopted?  Its simple, straightforward, and open, which, you would think, would mean success.  Me, I still hate the fact that we have apps in the first place, and just wish the promise of HTML5 would win out.  Still, I'm rooting for this...