Value in the "Internet of Things"

Phil Windley has a great article titled “Personal Event Networks: Building the Internet of Things." His discussion of value is insightful:

The reason I bought a Kindle 2 when the Nook had arguably more enticing hardware is because of how the device was connected–it had the Amazon ecosystem backing it, and it integrated well with some other things like Facebook and Twitter. I never even considered the Sony ereader because it was just an ereader with no connection outside itself.

All the same, I wish my Kindle updated Goodreads for me–that would give me a lot of value. Instead, I have to enter my progress manually in Goodreads, and copy and paste quotes I want to share. The services don’t talk to each other. Reading ten pages on the Kindle ought to be enough for Goodreads to update my progress, rather than requiring it to be a discrete action. This leads to another of Phil’s points:

An event network is the best model to enable these kinds of interactions. The Kindle needn’t implement the Goodreads API; it could just raise events. Then I can use a language like KRL to glue it together with Goodreads.