Lemon Foundation

Of late, the term or acronym Web 2.0 has been bandied about quite a lot by loads of people from differing backgrounds with different points of view.  Many of the people doing the bandying about are simply using a term which has become almost ubiquitous with the predicted next “internet boom”.

Web 2.0 shouldn’t be an acronym for the next boom, but rather something which describes an attitude towards the web and your users.  The poster child for this attitude is Ajax (Asynchronous Javascript And XML), which in brief enables the creation of rich web based user interfaces that facilitate data transfer between web page and server without having to reload entire pages.

At this years annual SxSW (http://www.scsw.com/) festival in Austin, Texas, we heard from Jesse James-Garett that Ajax was originally coined by himself as a hook to explain a new type of technology to business people.  He mentioned how he used the acronym to describe how the technology connects with the needs of users rather than just as cool technology which is nice to play around with.  As such, he stressed that it was and is still not a magic bullet, where Ajax is more of a next logical step on the web, rather than the last step; and that the evolution of decoupling a user’s interaction with a web page from server side processes is definitely here to stay.  Already, the growing numbers of open source Ajax frameworks make it easy enough to get started with creating a seamless user interaction, and are testimony to the popularity of this asynchronous approach.  As usage grows, Ajax will probably evolve to become smarter, faster and easier to use as the needs and habits of users change.

But how does this differ from the older way of doing things? 

Web 2.0, where Ajax is one of the enabling tools that defines the Web 2.0 experience, is a move away from the old paradigm of brochureware sites and top down content management, to web based applications that engender a rich, memorable user experience, encouraging user participation and user generated content. 

As a business person, this signals a move from:

1. static and semi-dynamic web sites to web applications that create and facilitate user interaction;
2. desktop applications to web applications that are always on, accessible to the user from any web enabled browser;
3. gaining eyeballs through advertising and then trying to own users loyalty, to owning the user data and then by process owning user eyeballs;
4. bulky user interfaces that require whole page reloads to accomplish even the smallest of actions, to slick user driven experiences that send data back and forth on the server seamlessly, without affecting the user experience adversely

Each and every one of these examples is underscored the user being put first, and by an increase in the usefulness factor, which is to say anything that is not useful to the end user will simply not gain more users and thus move towards profitability.  Some well known examples of this are Google Maps, Flickr, Del.icio.us, the new improved Yahoo! Mail, GMail, Google Calendar, Blinksale and Upcoming.org.

As such, Web 2.0 and thus Ajax probably are the NBT in so much as there isn’t really anything else on the horizon that can complete with their popularity and ubiquity, but only if they encompass the points above and not some kind of overzealous, crazy, greed driven gold-rush where every man and his dog tries to differentiate themselves by saying “Oh, we’re going web 2.0, you should check out our latest Ajax widget”.