Web 2.0 and AJAX – Everything Old Is New Again
After the dot-com bubble burst, it seems like all things Internet fell into a kind of malaise. Investors were scared to take risks, jobs were few and far between, and in general the Internet was being treated like a utility – a step below phone service, but above trash pickup.But some new AJAX-based offerings are bringing some of the old excitement back. You can start to see where the ‘Net can change the way we live, work, and interact again. Five in particular are in beta phase and well worth looking at: Meebo (unified IM and chat), NetVibes (aggregator and web-top console), BlinkList (bookmark manager and sharing), RoundCube (email), and Writely (word processing and document collaboration).
But first, a little history.
Back in the early 1990′s Sun Microsystems‘ motto was “The Network Is The Computer.” The idea was you could log into any machine and get at your working environment. The concept of the desktop PC becoming more of an appliance than a place to put things was novel and … well … ahead of its time.
Now fast-forward about ten years. With the new Web 2.0 applications you can write documents, do online research, have a complete desktop, and so on all from within a browser window. The browser doesn’t care where you are, what kind of machine you’re on, or any of the things which fueled the various Platform Wars of the last couple of decades.
Which is why I sub-titled this: “Everything Old Is New Again.”
The applications listed below certainly aren’t the only ones of their kind. In fact, competition in some of these spaces is fierce. These are simply the ones which in my analysis look the most promising or show the most innovative and well-thought out functionality.
Meebo (www.meebo.com)
Meebo at its core is a multi-protocol instant messaging client. With it you can connect to Yahoo, GoogleTalk, AOL, ICQ, Jabber, and MSN networks – with multiple accounts on each – and view all these IM sessions through one web page. The system more or less treats the page as an MDI (mutiple document interface) container, so your actual desktop isn’t getting cluttered with a zillion chat windows (or all the ads which IM clients now seem to be geared around putting in your face). And your actual computer isn’t getting loaded up with a heavy application.The system remembers your account settings and has complete logging of all chat sessions. You can’t do some advanced things like a native IM client – file transfer, video, voice, etc. But who cares? The purpose of IM is sending messages.
in August, Meebo also launched their MeeboMe widget. This is a Flash-based widget you can embed on any web site. Anyone visiting that site will appear in your Meebo IM as an anonymous buddy. While this is still a little raw, you can’t help but see where this could lead in areas such as customer service and community building.
NetVibes (www.netvibes.com)
NetVibes is a web-top application and aggregator. You can group your content into tabs. You can also publish your tabs in the “NetVibes ecosystem” so anyone who shares your interest can share your news. The system has an API so folks are always writing new modules for everything from weather to managing other Web 2.0 applications.
When I first saw NetVibes my immediate reaction was that “they out-Googled Google.” NetVibes has the same clean look and efficiency of interface that Google has, but it’s better looking and somehow more “fun” than a Google application. It’s hard to qualify, but the user experience just seems better than what other similar systems are offering.
{mosimage} BlinkList (www.blinklist.com)
Think of BlinkList as kind of a “next generation” of del.icio.us. The big difference is AJAX. BlinkList uses all the Web 2.0 design methodology to produce a bookmark manager which in some respects is better than native desktop applications of the same genre.
BlinkList offers the same tagging and browser integration as the wide array of other such services. Plus you can share your bookmarks if you wish, and look for other things people on BlinkList have bookmarked. Again, nothing new. But when used through the AJAX-based interface a lot of the clumsiness of working with so much imformation (how many 1000′s of bookmarks do you have?) is made more manageable.
Also, BlinkList provides thumbnails for the sites in your lists which is more helpful than you’d think. Many times when looking for a site that was visited months, or years, ago one will remember what it looked like more than what it said. Thumbails help out in this regard.
A boomark manager is a pretty important application for anyone who works on or with the Web on a regular basis. Your bookmarks are your knowledge base and previously you had to rely on your browser or an application to keep track of them all. Which also meant the headache of synchronizing these from machine to machine. And, what happens if you’re at work and need a bookmark that’s on your PC at home? With a service like BlinkList you have all that information available from anywhere on the web.
RoundCube (www.roundcube.net)
RoundCube is an AJAX-based IMAP webmail client. This means you can do a lot of the things you would do through a native application like drag-and-drop messages into folders. In short, it provides a nicer email experience for web users.
What makes RoundCube more interesting is that it’s Open-Source, where as the other offerings described in this article are free services, RoundCube is free code. Already it has been integrated into the Drupal CMS, and no doubt into a few other similar systems as well. The “big picture” on this is that users are no longer beholden to Google or Yahoo to be able to get a nice, easy-to-use webmail client.
Writely (www.writely.com)
Writely is a web-based word processor on steroids. The boost isn’t from fancy formatting feature – this is not a web-based version of MS Word. In fact, the formatting is pretty much limited to basic HTML kinds of constructs. Writely’s juice comes from the ability to have a revision history of your documents; to be able to share your documents with individuals or the whole world; and to be able to collaborate on a document with other people on the ‘Net.
Writely does a decent job importing things like MS Word, so it is possible to migrate content to Writely from your desktop. But you still do not want to use this to write your next novel – it simply isn’t built for that. But for things like keeping your resume online (and up to date) or working on a business plan with someone over the ‘Net, Writely is ideal.
The “big picture,” though is seen when one considers how much of business is based on text documents. A service like Writely opens the door for the kind of remote workplace that previously requires a fairly significant corporate IT infrastructure to maintain.
Summary
All of the products mentioned here are in beta as of the time of this writing. But the quality of the products – from functionality to user experience – is some of the best work I’ve seen in a long while. And as far as trends go, another on which is reasuring is that these companies are getting multi-million-dollar venture capital investments. A few years ago a VC would not even take a meeting with someone doing “another dot-com.” So hopefully Web 2.0 will also revive the business of building things for the Internet.
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