Cross-platform mobile Web apps may be poised to become a big part of the future of the Web, but they just aren't as powerful as native apps yet. Cabana, a do-it-yourself mobile Web app creation platform first seen at the Launch conference in February, announced a big new step today that will make mobile Web apps far more feature-rich as well. It's called the Cabana Exchange, and it's an API marketplace that allows app builders to incorporate some powerful 3rd party data and functionality.

The first partners in the Cabana exchange are location platform SimpleGeo and API service Mashery (disclosure: Mashery is a ReadWriteWeb sponsor). Through Mashery, the exchange will include APIs from Klout, Qwerly, FanFeeder, Rotten Tomatoes and WhitePages.com.

Each of those is a good chunk of functionality to bring to the crowded market of DIY mobile app creation tools. That's social ranking (Klout), cross-network profile discovery (Qwerly), sports stats (FanFeeder), movie ratings (Rotten Tomatoes) and contact info look-up (WhitePages.com). On a little mobile Web app! Plus SimpleGeo location data. Impressive.

There are a number of drag and drop, DIY mobile Web app creation services and most of the others offer cross-platform native app creation too, for a fee. Cabana does not yet. Either way, the possibilities become fairly nuts when you combine Web content into a mobile app you can create in a day.

Here's a description of how I made an awesome mobile Web app with competing service Genwi. Give me a marketplace of APIs to incorporate into those apps, and that's pretty exciting. I haven't tested Cabana yet, I gotta confess, so I don't know about its performance, optimization or stability (in my experience, it's much about caching content) but this new functionality is very interesting.

Not everyone thinks this is the best way to do it, of course. Sravish Sridhar is the CEO of Kinvey, a Boston-based startup that provides mobile back-end functionality as a service in the cloud. About Cabana, Sridhar says, "Cabana places emphasis on the device connecting to various services. In essence, the device becomes the platform. It's opposite to what companies like Amazon are saying with Silk, where the cloud is the platform. Both are valid ways to do it and the market will decide."

Hopefully we'll see a big battle between startups working to make the creation of new mobile apps as easy, cheap, powerful and feature-rich as possible - whether natively or on the mobile Web.

Bizness has an iPhone app creation system similar to Widgetbox or Genwi's iSites (my favorite) but now it lets you create a dynamic and native (not web) iPad app and host it for $39 per month. I tested it out and the Content Management System is easy to use, relatively powerful and rich with features. It's particularly well suited to restaurants and other small local businesses. Bizness also positions itself well for designer resellers.

Once the app is done, Bizness Apps can upload it to iTunes or the Android Marketplace for you under its account, or you can pay the $99 developer account fee to Apple and do it yourself.

Technologies like this represent a fascinating democratization of a new means of communication. The mobile world is a big, beautiful place and I suspect that many small businesses have spent enough time and money on a designed web page that a revamped mobile webpage is less appealing than a lightweight new app.

Presuming that the service is a good deal long run (good customer service, stable etc.) then this represents something the world really needs. It's an easy way for anyone to get into the iPad app world. Tools like this are to mobile apps what blogging was to publishing. Most blogs may not read like the New York Times, but thank goodness for them (us!) anyway, right? Likewise, lightweight mobile app creation tools may not produce the next award winning design miracle but they could deliver a whole lot of functionality and value to a large number of people.

To check out this app yourself, navigate your phone to the URL designnews.isites.us. Read on for screenshots and a description of the geeky fun behind this little creation.

I began with a service called Widgetbox, which is very attractive and easy to use but in the end got replaced by the iSites site linked to above.

First, I bopped around the Web and found about 30 or 40 of the top blogs about design and typography. I uploaded them to the wonderful service Postrank, which let me filter out all but the top 10% of posts from those blogs that had received the most comments, inbound links, shares on Twitter, bookmarks on Delicious, etc.

I took those 40 or so filtered feeds and I put them into Yahoo Pipes. There I spliced them all together and put the resulting feed of hot blog posts from the design world into my mobile Web app as the first of three sections.

Then, I went to Listorious and I found a good-looking Twitter list of power-designers curated by Paul Olyslager titled UX-VIP. Nice list, Paul! Thanks for building it! I put that List URL into my mobile Web app and now Twitter updates from those 42 UX VIPs make up the second section of content.

Finally, I visited the design community Dribbble, where users upload screenshots of their works in progress and other users like and comment on them. It's an awesome site. One of the sections of that site is a Leader Board of the designers whose work has been Liked the most. I grabbed the RSS feeds of the top 35 peoples' images, put those feeds into Pipes, spliced them together into one feed and then fed them into the mobile Web app as well.

Then I clicked publish! (Well, I put together a few little graphic assets for Widgetbox, iSites whipped up some for me.)

Both of these sites charge about $25 per month to host the apps their services are used to create. (Once a publisher pays for it, readers can access it for free.) That meant, I found out (after doing all the above, like a dummy), that my birthday present for my friend was going to cost $300 for a year. My wife and I really like Brianne a lot, but I thought that would be a bit extravagant. I told Widgetbox that their $25 per month for up to 50,000 impressions might make a lot of sense for many people, but for a one-off app likely to get 100 impressions a month it sure would be nice if I could pay an affordable fee to turn my up-and-coming designer friend on to their fabulous platform!

In the end Widgetbox didn't work for me anyway because there was so much feed splicing insanity going on behind the scenes that the app would time out almost every time I loaded it.

Enter iSites, a similar if so-far less polished service which works similarly but caches the contents on the back end for maximum user experience!

I gave iSites the same feeds, they generously shared an app's worth of hosting at no cost (you can add it too, go ahead!) and they said they'd consider one-off pricing. (Widgetbox also donated an app, it just didn't work as well for me.) iSites also offers a 30-day free trial. The iSites apps need some more work, and the company says that's underway, but they're really pretty good already. Liking and Commenting on content is very cool - sharing on Twitter is very much not, yet.

A person could create mobile Web apps like this on any kind of topic and they sure are fun. Maybe I'll start a Kickstarter campaign to see who wants to pitch in on apps like this for other topics.

Either way, fun with feeds - fun with mobile Web app publishing platforms!

See also: How to Track the Future of the Music Industry

That said, however, Obama has dominated the online discussion since day one. It would appear that when it comes to spreading his campaign message via widgets, there's no exception to the rule -- Obama widgets are far and away the most popular. (Though, note that the data on this graph is based on the candidate's most popular widget in the Widgetbox system, and not averaged across multiple widgets -- so it's really only good for looking at a general trend.)

We tried to match peaks and valleys in widget installs to news events to see if there was any correlation, which is really difficult with this data. It looks like Obama saw a growing number of installs in the run up to the Ohio and Texas primaries (entering which he'd won something like 11 or 12 contests in a row) -- then flat-lined for a month after he lost them. Clinton saw a modest bump after Super Tuesday in February where she scored huge wins in New York and California. Sen. John McCain saw a big dip the first week in March, which coincided with his becoming the presumptive nominee and President Bush's endorsement (we'll let you guess which might have turned people off his widget...).

But what's important about this data, is the trends. Starting with the Iowa caucuses just after New Year's, Barack Obama has seen his widgets spread steadily across the web. And even though his campaign does push the widgets on his site, 80-90% of new installs are coming via widgets embedded on non-official blogs -- they're coming from the grassroots rather than via the campaign itself. Clinton and McCain widgets are also being spread virally by supporters, though clearly not as fast. It does look like McCain supporters are doing a better job of embracing new web technologies than they were earlier in the election cycle, though -- the first McCain widgets appeared on Widgetbox in mid-February and have enjoyed mostly steady upward growth since.

This is really just another data point to watch to gauge which candidate has momentum. It's really quite amazing to look a things like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and widgets to measure a US presidential election -- the last time around most of these tools didn't exist (or at least weren't nearly as important).