Digg for the iPhone

What are iPhone applications going to look and feel like? We saw yesterday a simple shopping list application, and here's another one bound to be a big hit: Digg for the iPhone.

This "app," like others to come, is really just a Web site designed for the JavaScript in Safari, and for the iPhone's small screen. (It works in Firefox and IE, too). The interface employs the "fling" feature that Steve Jobs and the iPhone commercials show off: when you drag down a list with your fingertip (or mouse), and let go, it feels like the list has inertia. It keeps going for a little bit. It also "bounces" off the stops if you try to fling past the end of the list. It's very intuitive.

Wired's Cult of Mac blog says this interface is even better than the full Digg site. I think it's a little small for that, but it is a lot more fun to fling Digg than it is to just click.

The fact that iPhone apps sites can be built so fast is going to make it a great computing platform. In fact, what we thought was the product's great liability--a closed development environment that would keep the cellular network overloads happy--may turn out to be its greatest asset. By forcing development onto the browser, a million more products will bloom than if developers had to code new iPhone apps for the operating system beneath it.