Wednesday, October 31st, 2007
Category: Web20
The Pownce team released version 1 of the Pownce API yesterday. The API allows for various methods of retrieving Pownce-related data such as notes, users or fans and allows for return data to be formatted as XML or JSON. Since the API will be evolving quickly, the team has also taken the added step of providing versioning for requests to ensure a level of backward compatibility when a new version of the Pownce API is released. Features soon to follow include:
- More response formats.
- Authentication via OAuth.
- APIs for posting notes.
- APIs for getting friends-only and private notes.
In addition, a new Fan Project page has been created to allow new projects to be featured. There’s currently one application on the page, iPownce (Pownce for iPhone), but undoubtedly this page will fill up quickly.
To get the latest news about the API, be sure to sign-up to the PownceAPI Google group.
Thursday, August 2nd, 2007
Category: Editorial, Web20
The sky is falling! Every publication has to have it’s resident curmudgeon. It’s a franchise, and PC Magazine’s is held down by John Dvorak. Now he’s moaning about a dot-com bubble redux involving Web 2.0 based companies.
Each of these bubbles had a distinctive theme. For the dot-com bubble, it was e-commerce—it really should have been called the e-commerce bubble. Everything was focused on how the Internet was going to destroy all existing brick-and-mortar operations. We were told that you’d be buying sandwiches over the Internet and having them delivered the next day by FedEx. Everything was about “eyeballs” and finding ways to attract customers, whether they bought anything or not. Every article in every newspaper in the country parroted the litany as to how you’d be out of business in a year or two if you were not present on the Web in a big way. Of course, this was all crap.
The current bubble, already called Bubble 2.0 to mock the Web 2.0 moniker, is harder to pin down insofar as a primary destructive theme is concerned.
He goes on to scoff at the various concepts that are in vogue in the Web 2.0 space, all of which could come tumbling down in a crash.
- Neo-social networking
- Video mania
- User-generated content
- Mobile everything
- Ad-leveraged search
- Widgets and toolbars
An economic bubble is
defined as
“trade in high volumes at prices that are considerably at variance from intrinsic values”. Is that really where we are? I don’t see all that many “me too” or momentum investments in Web 2.0 companies — just a $10 million investment here or there by some VC’s. Facebook has a large valuation because they actually generate lots of advertising income (shoot, 1% of
all online time is spent on Facebook), and online advertising it here to stay.
Most of the Ajax/Web 2.0 activity I see right now is existing companies retooling their online presence to take advantage of some of the new technologies and ideas.
Sorry Dvorak, no bubble here yet.
Saturday, December 30th, 2006
Category: Ajax, Usability, Editorial, Web20
It’s the time of year to be posting random predictions for 2007. Here are 2007 Ajax predictions from Dion and myself, please post your own in the comments.
Dion predicts:
- Ajax beats AJAX in all but bad newspapers.
- Someone tries to coin Ajax 2.0.
- A large amount of apps have flash AND ajax, and users don’t know or care.
- Many frameworks consilidate or die.
- A widget api means componts can run on many frameworks using one api.
- Ajax wpf/e interop.
- Dashboards become front boards.
- More desktop apps get written with javascript.
Michael predicts:
- 2005 was the year that developers learned all about Ajax and by 2006 everyone else in the industry had caught up. In 2007, is is mainstream users who become acutely aware of the trend towards rich applications inside the browser, and discover that even word-processors and spreadsheets - along with a wide array of workplace applications - can be webified. At the same time, users remain oblivious - and rightly so - to the underlying technologies that power them.
- The boundaries of Ajax harden, with most developers gaining a clear understanding of what it can and can’t do with modern browsers and managers in a better position to decide on application architecture (whether to use Ajax, Flash, desktop, etc.).
- More attention on Ajax accessibility due to some government report or court case.
- Google Office. Finally!
- Backlash against Google Office as managers learn that their data must be hosted externally in order to use it. Pressure from bloggers and some analysts to make an Office appliance that can live behind the firewall, but it’s not happening in 2007.
- The advertising and media communities finally become aware that page view metrics are no longer the only way, but generally treat it as a problem and fail to see that the situation is actually better than before.
- Several fringe technologies heat up as developers notice they are already being used in some applications and learn how to apply them: HTTP Streaming (Comet), Virtual Workspace (Live Scrolling - never-ending scrollbars), Cross-Domain JSON (along with JSONP, JSON APIs, JSONRequest, and a general lack of awareness about the JSON security issues), Unique URLs (bookmarkability/back button), Lazy Registration (personalized functionality before formal signup). Comet in particular … it may be 8 or 9 years old, but it’s big news in 2007.
- Other fringe technologies grow, but remain, well, fringe. Such as Host-Proof Hosting and applications involving offline storage.
- With its excellent documentation and pattern language integration, the Yahoo UI library becomes the standard weapon of choice among mainstream developers seeking a pure Javascript framework. In the Java world, GWT makes great strides as the platform becomes richer and design patterns emerge.
- Mobile web development continues to suck.
- Javascript increasingly recognised as the world’s most popular “second language” and becomes popular as a lingua franca to describe generic programming concepts. Several attempts at server-side Javascript frameworks.
- IE7 causes more than a few headaches.
- Firebug is installed by pretty much any developer using Firefox.
- CSS is back, baby! Echoing the recent mass adoption of Javascript, developers who previously had a fleeting familiarity with CSS now become fluent practitioners.
Best wishes for 2007, however you play your Ajax!
Monday, August 28th, 2006
Category: Google, Web20
This has been such a rolling press release that I’m not sure it qualifies as news anymore, but it’s in the New York Times so it must be news. Google announced today that it is providing a set of hosted applications for small to medium sized businesses. The beta service will be free for now, and the premium service is under development.
What comes with the application suite? From the overview FAQ:
You can currently choose from Google Mail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, and Google Page Creator. Also, you’ll soon be able to add a Personalized Start Page for your domain.
I think everyone knew that this was coming, and there’s been speculation about Google offering its office-like applications — including Writely and Spreadsheet — as a pay service, for several months. The last two paragraphs of the Times article, however, point toward these applications being offered as appliance-based software to larger companies.
Providing technology to corporations and large organizations accounts for less than 2 percent of Google’s revenue, but the business is increasingly critical, Mr. Girouard said. Most of that involves selling “server appliances,” large computers that take on the job of conducting searches of large databases and company records.
“We are a very small part of Google’s overall business, but we’re growing quickly,” he said.
If Google starts to cut into Microsoft’s market share, this could prove the software as a service (SaaS) business model and might trigger a land rush by online companies into areas heretofore the exclusive domain of desktop application vendors.
Update: just saw this Red Herring article on the 17 competitors to MS Office. A thorough article that covers more than just the usual handful of Web 2.0 startups, it is well worth reading if for nothing else than these sorts of heartwarming quotes:
WriteBoard can seem almost bare-bones in its features, but Mr. Fried is betting on simplicity. “The problem with the traditional software industry is that they have to bloat their products,” he said. “They have to add more and more so they can get more money out of their users next year, but we don’t want to follow that model.”
Yes. Bring back the simple 64k application. My Commodore 64 is still somewhere in a closet in my parents’ house. ;-)
Category: Web20
Gregor Hohpe got together with a wild bunch to come up with some Web 2.0 Patterns. The group contained Bill Scott from Yahoo!, Jennifer Tidwell, Cal Henderson from Flickr, John Musser who runs ProgrammableWeb, Martin Fowler, Sandy from Meebo, and others.
One fall out was a set of values:
We tried to compile a set of values, along the lines of the Agile Manifesto. The key with the agile values is that is used a “X over Y” format where Y by itself is a fairly reasonable goal. For example, the value is not “Working Software over Broken Software” (duh!) but “Working Software over Comprehensive Documentation”. Here are some of our candidates:
- Simplicity over Completeness
- Long tail over Mass Audience
- Share over Protect
- Advertise over Subscribe
- Syndication over Stickiness
- Early Availability over Correctness
- Select by Crowd over Editor
- Honest voice over Corporate Speak
- Participation over Publishing
- Community over Product
I am sure another fall out will be a new O’Reilly book ;)
Tuesday, August 15th, 2006
Category: Ajax, Articles, Web20
Jeremy Keith has written about his experience taking tagging to the web 2.0 extreme, incorporating Ajax via Hijax, rel-tag, del.icio.us API, x-folk entries, and more:
Each journal entry page now shows the tags at the end of the post. These are linked (using rel-tag of course) to an aggregate tag page that shows any other posts with the same tag. Pretty standard stuff.
But then I thought it would be fun to tie the post in with other things I’ve tagged, not on this site but on Del.icio.us. Under the heading “Related”, you’ll find links to the same tags for my del.icio.us links.
Rather then sending you off to Del.icio.us, I’m using the Del.icio.us API to bring the results back to this site. Using a bit of Ajax, these results are displayed without a page refresh. I’m using Hijax so if JavaScript is disabled, the links will still work.
I’ve got a nice little progress bar going while the request is being sent, and a bit of a colour fade happening when the response comes back. The results themselves could probably do with some more styling. Right now I’m just displaying them in a regular unordered list of x-folk entries but I think they might look nice if they were more comment-like in appearance.
Tuesday, August 1st, 2006
Category: Articles, Web20
According to the new article on the Tekrati.com site today, ZapThink is suggesting that rich internet applications based around the technologies of Ajax, Flash and Java will be replacing any and all static web sites/applications and portals.
Demand for Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) and more sophisticated user interaction is increasing dramatically, and enterprise spending on RIA applications will surpass $500 million by 2011, according to ZapThink. The analysts say enhancements to six types of business applications are helping drive RIA spending: high-transaction and event-driven Internet applications, next-generation portals, enhanced business intelligence solutions, application modernization, and Service composition or “mashup” solutions.
They talk about a report ZapThink has put out, showing that an end user experience with Ajax-enabled functionality, a nice interface, and good performance won out over a more traditional page structure. The RIA market is divided up into three submarkets looking at delivering components, environments, and extensions to help make the creation of these interfaces easier. They also mention four “primary means” of implementing these applications:
- Adobe Flash virtual machine-based approaches
- browser-based approaches that use JavaScript, XML, and other technologies (Ajax)
- approaches that use Java applets or ActiveX controls
- custom-developed Java or .NET clients
Monday, July 31st, 2006
Category: Web20, Mobile
On the Web 2.0 Journal today, there’s a new article from Ajit Jaokar asking for a real definition of what “mobile web 2.0″ really means.
I see Web 2.0 as the Intelligent web or ‘Harnessing Collective Intelligence.’ Mobile Web 2.0 extends the principle of ‘Harnessing Collective Intelligence’ to restricted devices. The seemingly simple idea of extending Web 2.0 to mobile Web 2.0 has many facets.
He lists out these facets - restricted devices, building for these devices, and what characteristics can be learned from them. He defines restricted devices in several ways including having one or more of these characteristics - easily carried, battery driven, limited input means, but not wearable.
He gives the iPod as a reference to show a good web/local PC model for mobile devices, a PC-powered interface to provide mobile content to a portable, easy to use device. This is more of a static idea than most think of when they think “mobile web 2.0″. More often, they think of methods to use things such as Ajax in a cellphone’s web browser. He suggests, though, that this is not “mobile web 2.0″ - it lacks the user generated compontent.
Thursday, July 20th, 2006
Category: Showcase, Web20
What do you get when you combine one part Digg, some of the best, cheapest products out there and a little splash of Web 2.0? You get DealsPlu.us, a new social shopping site with a user-controlled rating system similar to Digg’s pioneering format.
Our mission is simple, to save you time and money. We offer a distinctive place where people can share hot-deals from anywhere within the Internet world. Our feature allows people to know what the most hot-deals are and what people think about the deals.
The concept is simple (as some of the best ones are) - users are presented with deals on a wide range of merchandise, from audio/video options to home and garden offerings. Each has a plus button (”+”) that can be used to vote if you think the deal is good or not. This then allows for users to come along and discover the best deals as voted on by the rest of the site’s community. Clicking on this button also stores the deal (as a bookmark) to the users profile page for later review.
There’s even RSS feeds that you can subscribe to to get the latest deals as they come in as well as the latest coupons and offers the site recieves. Users can also submit deals that they might come across - espeically useful for those “one day only” deals lots of stores offer.
Category: Editorial, Web20
Just a quick one to add a little humor into your Ajax coding experience from The Daily WTF:
The story tells the tale of an effort to get a new CMS at a company, one that was a bit more Web 2.0. Of course, the maker of the CMS didn’t quite think of the implications of those with less than stellar connections and, well, you’ll just need to read to understand the complete “makes me want to slap someone stupid” moment that comes later.
Enjoy!
Thursday, June 22nd, 2006
Category: Ruby, Web20, Conferences
Well, at least I’ll be heading to RailsConf tomorrow morning, and attempting to live blog as much ajax related content as possible. Ajaxian-in-training and coworker Jim Halberg will be there, as well. If Dion can recover from his twenty hours of flying, he might also make a celebrity appearance. If any readers are heading down and would like to hit up a bar or club, just holler at us.
As for Ajax sessions, I’ll be attending Rails, Ajax and Universal Design, Lazlo on Rails, and possibly Justin’s Ajax on Rails. Are there other sessions you would like to see coverage of from Ajaxian? If we cover non-Ajax specific sessions here, will you be pissed off? Will we ever fix the comment system?
We put these pressing questions to you, the Ajax community.
Friday, June 16th, 2006
Category: Editorial, Web20
In this new article, E-Consultancy asks the question “Are all Ajax homepages doomed?”
Dozens of personalised homepages have emerged over the past 18 months as developers started to programme lovely drag and drop interfaces, allowing users to customise the layout of their personal homepage. Cool technology, great use of AJAX, but is there trouble ahead?
They talk about the closing of Fold.com as just the start of “the end”, the passing of the facination with the whole “Web 2.0 desktop” idea. One reason of this decline, he states, is the lack of a business model for them, with only a few managing to garner enough interest for some funding (such as NetVibes).
He also notes that just because something is a great product doesn’t make it a great business. He suggests a move from the “just a desktop” idea to something more communal, more socially interactive to draw people in and give them something fresh to see and do each time.
Can an AJAX homepage solve a problem? Sure, but perhaps we need to see an implementation on an existing website with a solid business model. You know, Tesco, Amazon, eBay. Maybe we’ll create something for you, fine E-consultancy reader, to allow you to customise our homepage.
Tuesday, April 18th, 2006
Category: Utility, Web20
If you’ve ever wanted to just sit someone down and show them how to get to a certain section/feature on your site but couldn’t, you might be in luck. There’s a free service that’s offered to record the movements that you make on a page and play them back to anyone with the right URL - Tapefailure.com.
TAPEFAILURE is a “history recording tool.? What this means is that anyone can record a browsing session using TAPEFAILURE’s recorder, then save it, and share it with others. Each recorded session can be played back virtually perfectly through our playback tool; as long as you know the tape ID or have a link, you can view your recorded session over and over again.
The site is designed for simplicity, and has a familiar browsing interface to make recording a snap. It’s as easy as loading the page, and hitting the “record” button at the top. It saves what you’ve done/clicked on/scrolled to to their servers via an Ajax connection and passes back a playback URL. The playback is a real-time representation of what you previously recorded, right down to the page load times.
Tapefailure is an interesting expirement in uses for Ajax, but outside of site walkthroughs or training purposes, I’m not sure what else it might be used for.
Tuesday, March 28th, 2006
Category: Usability, Web20
After our recent story on NetJaxer, Chris Saad from Touchstone alerted us that he’s working on a similar concept.
(T)he idea of having a client-side heads-up-display to web-based apps is one that is a passion of mine.
I just wanted to let you know we have a similar solution (and a very firm strategy) that I’d love to get your feedback on!
You can find out more about it at www.touchstonegadget.com
From the manifesto
In a Web 2.0 world (where an increasing number of applications are moving to the web) Touchstone moves beyond ‘RSS as news’ and offers an opportunity for web-based applications to reach the user via an all-purpose client-side dashboard - even when the browser is closed.
With Touchstone, you can control and filter the flow of alerts from your company CRM application, the latest news from your favourite blogs and the progress of your downloads in one interface - an interface that could eventually follow you from device to device.
As with NetJaxer, it’s early days for Touchstone, which is currently in a limited-distribution alpha phase.
Friday, March 3rd, 2006
Category: Showcase, Web20
Remember DPolls, the Ajax polling application we posted about a couple of months ago? Well, now you can syndicate vote content on your own page:
Quimble keeps its easy-to-use interface, but now AJAX polls (using dynamic script tags - another topic you wrote about) are available to the general public.
Adding a new poll question is easy - you don’t need to register (Quimble cleverly uses Lazy Registration in a big way):
Once you’ve submitted the question, you’ll get some Javascript to include on your own page, which is how the cross-domain magic happens:
And here’s how it appeared on my web page - place your votes now!
Thursday, March 2nd, 2006
Category: Ajax, Showcase, Web20
There’s a new social networking site that brings a little Ajax into the mix and tries to link up beer drinkers (and their favorite places to go) - Coastr.com
Coastr is an experiment in social networking for beer snobs (meant as a compliment, of course!). The basic idea is for you to create a list of your favorite beers, and to connect you with other people with similar tastes. And those connections will help you discover interesting new brews that you might have not known about before. “Social beermarking”, if you will.
The site lists out four different things on the main page - recently added beers, most popular beers, recently added places, and most popular places. The whole site has that “Web 2.0″ feel to it, and Ajax is used to enhance the site, rather than the “use it anyplace we can” methodology. Once you’ve logged in, you can add beers and places of your own. When adding the beers, they use a “Google Suggest” kind of box to help you narrow things down, and in the “Add a place” area, they link it up with the geocoder.us/Yahoo! Local mapping to find the best matches for the location you entered. This data is all used later on when you select the “Places to Drink Beer” link from the top. A Google Map is shown, and you can spotlight the city of your choice (provided that there are entries from there) to see what spots others have reviewed in your area.
Coastr.com seems like it’s off to a good start, it just needs some community involvement behind it. Toss in a few more features, maybe an open API (similar to del.icio.us) and you just might be on to something…
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