Always be scanning. That’s the future of the smartphone in Google’s new program designed to bring interoperability to the internet of things. The plan, announced Thursday by Scott Jensen working as part of the Google Chrome group, involves giving every device the equivalent of a URL that could be read by the phone without having to open an app.

From a user perspective, it means you’d be able to call up a list of nearby connected objects and select the one you want to interact with from a ranked list. From there, the user selects the URL of the device he or she wants and the full experience for that device loads. Today it’s a web page, but eventually that experience could be anything from information to a transaction.

This makes tremendous sense when you consider that much of the value of the internet of things isn’t about engagement, but…