3pointD.com

TechCrunch has an interesting post that, along with its comments thread, mentions a few “meta” applications that can be used to build other apps without having to know how to code them yourself. I’m not a huge fan of form-based or drag-and-drop coding (it can never work as well as doing it yourself), but I think this new generation of tools could just give rise to some nice ideas. I wrote in a recent post about the 3pointD generation and how one of the things that will characterize it will be greater creation-power than ever before. Already, we’re seeing small teams of people create very powerful tools like Digg.com. Now we’re seeing people start to create the tools that can be used to create those tools. Stuff like WyaCracker and Zoho Creator may not be very powerful at the moment, but if people keep at it, they’ll eventually get somewhere. The challenge will be to create a tool that’s nearly as capable as a programming language, rather than something that simply lets you create variations on an already imagined theme. It doesn’t seem to be out there yet, but I’d wager it’s on its way.