What Google does is taken as something ‘new’ and ‘inovative’. Imagine if Microsoft comes up with Microsoft maps using ActiveX, the whole world wide web will curse it.

So who cares how long it has been around, lets just see how we can use it to create better sites.

Scripting the DOM, lazily loading content in the background (timers/xhr) and the rest of the collection of the ‘ajax’ bag of tricks can get you a lot of richness… now with less guilt or fear.

This is a *very* positive thing, imho.

I’m interested to see what server-side support appears here. I know that JSF will add some in-place-update (ipu/xhr) support, and I presume Tapestry, Struts, RoR, etc will as well.