Windows 8 app developers will have to work harder to convert people to dumb down for Metro

Wikipedia Windows 8 Metro

Four months since the Consumer Preview of Windows 8, most of the Metro apps available on the Windows 8 Store are nothing more than page turning.

If you want to browse the pages of a magazine, Metro apps are for you. Otherwise, Metro apps are the antithesis of the Web 2.0 experience. With the world poised to be in the Semantic Web of Web.3.0 Microsoft is not delivering on the promise.

Web 2.0 and onward

100,000 or 100 million apps is not the question – the apps need to match Web 2.0 and improve on the status quo with interactive HRML 5.0

Web 2.0 is all about interactive access to information on the web, media rich content with pics, videos, and links to other sites. Web 2.0 is about social media sharing.

Wikipedia defines Web 2.0 as “the network as a platform for information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. A Web 2.0 site allows users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators (prosumers) of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to websites where users (consumers) are limited to the passive viewing of content that was created for them.”

Ironically, the Wikipedia Metro app (screen captured above) is totally non-interactive. They feed you the stories like Web 2.0 never existed. If you want to search or link, there is a button to open Wikipedia is a browser.

Weather Network Metro App

It’s like Wikipedia think we are brain-dead, or at least the new consumers are brain-dead. Maybe they are.

Apple would like us to be brain-dead and accept their closed world. Google is more open than that.

We just got a weather app that works, The Weather Network, that tells you the weather now, later today and tomorrow.

AccuWeather Metro App

That seems basic but the AccuWeather app is essentially useless.

There is no easy way to find out what the weather will be during the day.

Instead they have a list of activities and tell you if they will be good or bad for five categories.

News Apps

Bing Daily News Metro App

I am a news hound like most people. I like to check the headlines and then pick stories to read.

Few of us have time to read the whole newspaper, that is unless we use Metro news apps, which are a cross between glossy magazines like Vogue and a Grade 8 reader.

Metro story “Justin Bieber grows up on Believe

The Bing Daily News looks inviting. The front page is full of pictures and Metro styled tiles. The feed seems to be Reuters which is a world source.

Click on a story and everything goes back to black and white text. There are no pictures of Justin Bieber. There are no links to his website, embedded videos or music. Just a page of boring text. You can’t share the story with Facebook, G+, StumbleUpon, Twitter or any of your favorite social media, You can only navigate back to the main page and try another story. You can’t even copy the html address to manually share the story.

Justin Bieber is all about his music and dance performance. A story about him that ignores the music is a waste of time that only parents read. 80 million people watched and shared his official video for “Boyfriend” but you won’t be able to see it in a Metro news app.

Some news apps lock up when you try to navigate. The standard Metro weather app locks up every time.

Things will have to get a lot better before launch.