Lemon Foundation

Every time I speak to someone these days, it seems that there is talk of doing something Web 2.0’ey.  I’ve had people email me for Ruby skills, without knowing what Ruby is; I’ve had people talk about Ajax mashups, when they don’t really know what a mashup is…. It’s getting all weird again, like it was in ’99.

That’s all fine and well, but I guess you’re wondering what is really going on, and what it means to you and your business?  For this post I wanted to outline a few things that are making waves, perhaps going into a little detail as to how you could be using them in some way.

RSS
To start with, RSS is probably going to end up being as big as email was and still is today.  In short, RSS is a really simple way to consume and syndicate data of pretty much every sort.  The technical bits are not really important here – but was important is that it functions just like an alert - when a piece of content consumable as RSS is updated, the RSS feed is automagically updated, so you’ve always got the latest content. 

In 5 years time, RSS clients will be much better than they are now, and I imagine that pretty much anything that can be consumed will at least be consumed in RSS.  So if you can spare the time, then you’re well off getting around RSS so that you know what it is and what it can do for you.

This technology helps me to browse many sites every day without even opening a web browser; helps me to stay on top of project updates, sports scores, new comments to my blog; receive updates on events I’m subscribed to and a few other handy things that I otherwise wouldn’t do or know about.

My hunch is that pretty soon most consumer sites are going to be offering a filtered RSS approach to things.  You can already see this with most news sites where you are able to get an RSS feed of a particular category – imagine being able to do a search for a product, and then to get notified of a price fluctuation via a filtered RSS feed, without having to visit the site, or add a note to your diary to check it.

Mapping
The world is abuzz with mapping, ever since Yahoo! and Google introduced the first really cool interfaces to what used to be staid old maps you couldn’t move around.  So what we’re seeing, is that developers who have a grasp of API’s and access to some sort of geographical data, are releasing site that combine these rich interactive maps with static data (commonly known as a mashup in geek speak), to create stuff that until now was only a dream of the very imaginative. 

Thanks to the great work done around the world on a few key technologies, the rest of the world has an opportunity to use these newfangled tools that are hopefully making life easier and better. 

Chicago Crime is a great example of this; and so are a lot of the property sites coming out more recently:
http://www.nestoria.co.uk/wimbledon/property/buy/minbed-3
http://ononemap.com/map/index?maptype=Sales
http://www.housingmaps.com/
http://www.zoomf.com/

Tagging
The next darling of the cool web 2.0 crowd is tagging, which has seen a surge in popularity with the growth of major sites which are built on the tagging meme – basically that organisationally on the web most things are flat, and that we all have our own ways of remembering something and that if we combine our common tags, then we’re more likely to have a better grasp of the information and data out there.

Two really good examples of this are Del.icio.us and Flickr, which effectively use tagging to give people an easy to use view of their “stuff” whilst at the same time making it consumable by the community.  Digg is gaining in popularity (cream rises to the top), and the blogosphere is basically one massive tag cloud, best searched with Technorati and Google Blog search.

Ajax and JavaScript
There’s a neat technology called Ajax that is making waves, which doesn’t wash your dishes, but does make your browsing experience more enjoyable because you get to see the results of your interaction with a web page immediately.  You don’t get long page reloads, and you’re not likely to much truly ground breaking stuff in the nest 6 months or so, but you will start to see implementations of Ajax which do make things easier for you.

For example, imagine signing up at a site using your usual user name – if you could be warned while you’re typing in your user name that it is already in use, that would be much more user friendly than having to type it in and submit the form, only to be told that it’s wrong and you need to go back to the last page to do it all again, wouldn’t it?

JavaScript has really come a long way since the beginning of the web, and seems recently to have taken it’s place among the essential web skills to have, as well as an essential tool for creating neat user experiences.  Ajax is accomplished with JavaScript, but there are loads of things that JavaScript can do, that aren’t Ajax related – so the bottom line is that within the web page itself, you should expect to start seeing new things happening around the web that either make your experience easier, or more interactive, or both.

The funny thing is that these things I’ve just mentioned are just the tip of the iceberg.  They are by no means exhaustive, not anything to place a bet on (except maybe for RSS), but they are the things that everyone is talking about, and the bandwagon that everyone seems to want to get onto, so I guess it’s a good idea that you know a little bit more about them!

The sanest thing I can say is that when you’re starting a project, look at what you have, and then what you want to achieve, and then pick the proven technology that will do it for you – rather than starting with the assumption that a particular tech will make your project successful!