I would love to subscribe to / pay for service that are just APIs. Then have my agent organize them how I want.
Imagine youtube, gmail, hacker news, chase bank, whatsapp, the electric company all being just apis.
You can interact how you want. The agent can display the content the way you choose.
Incumbent companies will fight tooth and nail to avoid this future. Because it's a future without monopoly power. Users could more easily switch between services.
Tech would be less profitable but more valuable.
It's the future we can choose right now by making products that compete with this mindset.
Like, somehow I could tell my agent that I have a $20 a month budget for entertainment and a $50 a month budget for news, and it would just figure out how to negotiate with the nytimes and netflix and spotify (or what would have been their equivalent), which is fine. But would also be able to negotiate with an individual band who wants to directly sell their music, or a indie game that does not want to pay the Steam tax.
I don't know, just a "histories that might have been" thought.
This sort of thing is more attractive now that people know the alternative.
Back then, people didn't want to pay for anything on the internet. Or at least I didn't.
Now we can kill the beasts as we outprice and outcompete.
Feels like the 90s.
Where and how do they make money?
I remember seeing the CGI (serve url from a script) proposal posted, and thinking it was so bad (eg url 256-ish character limit) that no one would use it, so I didn't need to worry about it. Oops. "Oh, here's a spec. Don't see another one. We'll implement the spec." says everyone. And "no one is serving long urls, so our browser needn't support them". So no big query urls during that flexible early period where practices were gelling. Regret.
When I use telegram to talk to the OpenClaw instance in my spare Mac I am already choosing a new interface, over whatever was built by the designers of the apps it is using. Why keep the human-facing version as is? Why not make an agent-first interface (which will not involve having to "see" windows), and make a validation interface for the human minder?
I think it means front-end will be a dead end in a year or two.
That's literally not possible would be my take. But of course just intuition.
The dataset used to train LLM:s was scraped from an internet. The data was there mainly due to the user expansion due to www, and the telco infra laid during and after dot-com boom that enabled said users to access web in the first place.
The data labeling which underpins the actual training, done by masses of labour, on websites, could not have been scaled as massively and cheaply without www scaled globally with affordable telecoms infra.