How Ajax (and lots and lots of amateurs) are Changing the Web
Adaptive Path published a piece back in February about the way that smart web applications are changing the web by doing away with the click-reload-click-reload paradigm. You only need to look as far as Google Maps to see why this is a great thing. If you're a web designer or just entranced by how cool not having to wait for Google Maps to reload is every time you move the map check the piece out. It's fascinating.A few days ago, Adaptive Path's CEO (who boasts clients such as the UN and Intel) busted out with a very "1999"-ish prediction: the web itself is about to change.
The catch here is that Janice Fraser was here in 1999. In fact, she worked for Netscape back in 1996. She's intensely familiar with the whole "bubble" thing and isn't about to be sucked in by one cool new technology that promises to change everything.
Instead, she sees changing coming from the outskirts of the web, growing like a tide. She sees our army of amateur encyclopedia writers at wikipedia, our wannabe news-writers blogging away, our hobbyist geeks churning out open source code. And she's not alone.
Combine that groundswell of truly innovative development power (in the way that only hobbyists can innovate because they've got nothing to lose) with the coming shift from click-reload to true web based applications - and suddenly, her predictions of massive change don't seem that crazy. Speaking from my own experience as both a serious web-surfer and a writer/web-designer, my habits have changed significantly in the past few months. I get most of my "web" fix through my email client, thunderbird's rss reader. I've switched back to doing most of my design in a text editor using php and CSS+XHTML. The web is changing and the way you surf may never be the same. The user has more and more control over the content they consume every day. Some people see the tides of change as scary and threatening.
I say, grab your board - surf's up.
