web based scratch

What would a web based scratch look like?

I'm trying out sprout, a web-based widget builder. It's done in flash, with a flash-style interface. Visual editing, easy to throw together images, sound, movies, etc. You can do some simple interactions like make a button or a timer that moves you around between pages. You can also customize some built-in components, like the RSS feed shown here. I just dropped that on, put in the URL for the feed, moved and resized it, customized the fonts and colors. I also uploaded a scratch cat gif and put that behind it, and made the feed component a little transparent. Then it was just a couple more clicks to post it to blogger (or any of a bunch of other sites). Pretty easy to use, no programming involved, but you can't really do any real interactivity.




So, the Sprout idea is to make it easy to create shareable media mashup widgets all on the web. It's complementary to OpenCode and KogBox (neither of which are really in full swing, either) (and maybe Yahoo pipes?), which are about writing code on the web. Kogbox and pipes are really about mashing up different sources of data from the web. So the question is, where among these niches would a web-based scratch fit in?

If Scratch on the web is about mashing up RSS feeds, etc, then at the very least it would have to have some blocks for handling data structures like strings and arrays, I think. I was able to put that rss reader into my sprout with no code- but I had no control over its insides, which is what you'd want to have with scratch.

Perhaps we could take a cue from the wonderful ruby learning environment HacketyHack, which automagically sets you up with things like database tables, and easy commands for reading and writing to them safely. So along with your account, you have some safe data space.

What are the use cases? This will take more thought. Maybe kids will be able to make their own widgets that interact with social networking sites, like facebook applications? So e.g. kids could make their own version of the way you can give another user a "gift" on facebook? Will kids really want to reappropriate and analyze data from e.g. news websites, in order to use it for their own ends? Maybe they will! It's sort of a sci-fi theme that kid hackers will be the first ones to notice things like anomalous patterns of disease spread across geographic locations that provide clues to pandemics, or exert political clout with their command of real-time data, or anticipate trends in the entertainment industry by monitoring just the right sources of coolness. Maybe we can make those things easier for kids to do...