I’ve been traveling again, most recently to Seattle and Microsoft. As I spoke to folks at the company (marketers in particular), I tried out one of the ideas that’s rattling around my head: the architecture of “apps” is broken, and marketers can have a role in fixing it.

Broken? But it’s just getting started, right? Well, yes – and no. Apps are great, but they lack any number of characteristics that we’ve come to expect from a truly “Web 2″ world. First (and certainly foremost), apps are not connected, in the main, to other apps. They are single use-case driven – a fact that often makes them compelling. But however useful a focused app may be, it can only get more useful if it could communicate with other apps, the way that great web services do. After all, a core tenet of the Web 2 movement was APIs and web services. YouTube would never have become a signal service of the web without being embeddable onto blogs. And blogs would never have risen without RSS.

Second, apps, for the most part, live in “AppWorlds” that are closed and vertically integrated (at least for Facebook and Apple). That means they don’t live in an open, market-driven environment, and are taxed by the owners of distribution channels even before they reach the consumer. That’s not an ecosystem that will drive second and third orders of innovation.

Third, apps live in a world of clutter. I know folks who have more than 100 apps on their phone, and they can never remember which apps they used for what purpose. The average smart phone user has 40 or so apps on their phone, and turns over five a week. That is a curation nightmare – and an opportunity to create value above the level of a single app.

But to do so, phone OS manufacturers will have to encourage app developers to build hooks into apps so they can start to talk to one another. They may already be there, for all I (don’t) know, but so far apps aren’t talking to one another. And that’s a shame – and an opportunity.

As I’ve said many times over, in the world of conversational digital media, great marketers are adopting the skill sets of great publishers. Moreover, great marketers strive to address pain points in their customers’ lives. I predict that the management of apps, and the improvement of apps through connecting them to each other – will be both a pain point as well as an opportunity for marketers over the next few quarters.   

Meanwhile, on to the links of the day:

Google, Intel, Sony Develop ‘Google TV’ (IWantMedia/NYT) The TV is just a big iPad, right?

Sequoia’s Kvamme: Social Media Marketing Can Replace Advertising (GigaOm) Well, yes and no. Depends on your definition of advertising. If he means marketing, I disagree.

FTC Member Rips Into Google’s Privacy Efforts (PCWorld) As I said in an earlier Signal, watch this space. More: FTC Commissioner: Google’s Buzz Launch Was ‘Irresponsible Conduct’ (SEL)

The Whole Foods Twitter Case Study (Social Media Examiner) You know I love me some case studies.

The Future Of Publishing (DK via SAI) An unintentional viral video!

Ad Spending Share by Medium, December 2009 (MarketingProfs)

Letter to Google from Chinese Ad Partners Could Be Fake (ClickZ) Someday a tick tock of all this drama between China and Google must be written.

iGroups: Apple’s New iPhone Social App in Development (PatentlyApple) Oh boy. Everyone’s peanut butter, meet everyone’s chocolate. Talk about a chess game….

Wired Magazine on the iPad (Reuters) Given my previous rant on this topic, why not revisit it? Well….turns out the writer of this piece doesn’t like where this is all headed either.

The Death of the Pageview (RWW) A bit of a misleading headline, but good stuff in here. At FM we do a ton of the work outlined in the piece.

The Current State of Twitter [INFOGRAPHIC] (Mashable) Lots to digest here….

————–

And we have a winner! Earlier in Signal I said I’d choose one new subscriber to the Signal email newsletter from the first 100 who would get a free pass to the CM Summit this June (more than $1500 value). Van Riper, you have won! We’ll be notifying you via email. Congrats!

I’ll be picking another winner from the next 100, so if it suits your information consumption goals, sign up for it on the Signal home page (upper right box)!

If you read FM’s Signal, then you’ll want to come to the CM Summit this June 7-8 in New York City. Join the founders of AdMob, Boxee, Foursquare, and the CEOs of Razorfish, Moxie, GroupM, as well as top execs from Adobe, Google, The New York Times, Starbucks, AT&T and more.