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by Jonathan Crossland.
Original Post: making it all work better
Feed Title: Jonathan Crossland Weblog
Feed URL: http://www.jonathancrossland.com/syndication.axd
Feed Description: Design, Frameworks, Patterns and Idioms
As we all know, the real needs and hopes within the web have far surpassed our technologies.
My son, has come into the web world over the last few years. Learning html a few years back, he was horrified at the little he could do, and the flimsy nature of html.
I tried explaining first the history, what the web looked like 10 or more years ago. I tried explaining the full extent of what one could do with related technologies, the dhtml, the javascript.
I must admit, I feel strongly about our web, watching it grow over time, all the ups and downs. How dare he call it old and clumsy. He sees it as vinyl vs cd.
I like vinyl and cd.
But he is right though. I have gotten excited about nearly every latest technology that comes out. Look at Ajax. But I am the sort who dives into stuff and likes the challenges.
But user expectations are getting higher and higher, and our technologies struggle to keep up.
8 years ago, I wanted to develop a search engine for the desktop. A long time ago. I wanted to revive the idea around a year before google released desktop, but I couln't setup such a large infrastructure.
Here are some of the functions I thought my desktop search engine would have.
You search the web but from your desktop
You can organize and rank results for yourself
via a P2P type scenario or locally centrallized store you search other stores within your house-hold
Imagine your partner loves animals and has built quite a collection of results, websites and categorized, ranked them. You then decide one day to to search on cats, so you select your partners store.
Take that concept out with P2P or a Web 2.0 scenario, and share your search indexes with others
Build a web driven interface to allow combinations of user stores
If I am searching on the "semantic web", across search engines, blog search engines, blogs etc, why cant I have it stored and organized by me?
There are of course many things we can do for our web and some are happening or moving now.
I like microformats and
Microsoft Gadgets (for those who knew of my killer app idea in 1999) would have seen a remarkable resemblance to live.com Happy at least that the idea is living and being developed. also see google' gadgets
Unlike my idea, though these are locked down. or can you have it on your website too? I dont think so.
The Semantic Web and all the infrastructure formats and technologies to come, will help us organise and share data, like never before.
But it is also akin to what DDE provided us for windows applications, and later OLE and later ActiveX.
In a web sense we are just moving away from DDE and into OLE.
I like the analogy because it makes it clear that where we are still low down the food chain and provides a view, that we have a future.
Web 2.0 promises a lot. I think it will get us into the "OLE" stage, together with rss and other formatss.
But a greater whole, something else is coming soon too. I can feel it.
I think there will be another killer app arriving within the next year or so. One is being built somewhere as we speak. :)
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