Concept 2.0

As we move ever more towards an environment where everyone has a browser than can deal with AJAX, the temptation is going to continue to grow to write the code exclusively client-side and not have a server side end for people who can't use AJAX.

Generally I try to make everything backward compatable but you are never going to get it just as good (as if you could there would be no point doing it). And if it works for everyone using client side AJAX you don't even need it. Which is fine if you are writing yourself an admin panel that only you are going to use but if you have it on a live site you are going to find that some of your users could be excluded.

How long will it be until this is ok though? When it's acceptable for big sites to ignore people that can't support AJAX? It's probably a situation we want to avoid. That said, there is hope. With the advent of mobile browsers people will start designing for them more. That said, many of those support some quite cool features already and will continue to expand their feature range.

Too many people have a hate of Web 2.0. So many people have a problem with it. "Don't talk to me about Web 2.0." Why though? To be honest, it's not an overused buzzword. Because there is loads of Web 2.0 going on at the moment. Sure we still don't really know what it is, but we do know that we are doing it :p.

Besides, it's new there is bound to be plenty of start-ups and because of this there is justification for going on and on about Web 2.0. If you want to moan about an overused buzzword, moan about blogs. Everything has to be a blog these days! You can't have a new section, updates, journal, the list goes on - everything has to be called a blog these days. Web 2.0 is still for the most part just used for actual Web 2.0.

A new site named Script Mimic has just launched which allows you to put in a request for a script that can mimic the behavior of an existing site. Which basically means if you want to produce a clone of say MySpace or YouTube, you can find it on the site.

It's a good idea. People are producing so many Web 2.0 clones these days that I considered developing an easily deployable social networking site to add to the range of Particle Soft products. Speaking of which, I was quite pleased to find that Particle Wiki had already been listed as a good script to use for a Wikipedia clone.

Had an interesting discussion with a friend of mine today. He really hates Web 2.0 so featuring on this blog makes for an interesting decision. But he makes a good point. Basically he things this.

Web 2.0 relies on people. People are idiots.

Which is a good point really. User's can't be trusted to create good quality non-illegal non-pornographic non-copyright infringing content. Which is a problem faced by many of the big sites - attracting advertisers is hard when your content is essentially really, really bad.

I hope you have tested your sites with Internet Explorer 7 - most of one sites worked fine but several needed some tuning and IE7 is getting rolled out to Windows XP users as we speak. And that means a lot of people will soon be using it.

Every day another million or so social networks launch. Ok, that's not a real figure, I am of course just being sarcastic but it feels like there are loads of new sites launching. That's great but do we really need them all? The obvious answer is no. It's also the right answer. There are way too many social networks launching.

The problem is, Web 2.0 is really good but too many people are looking at it from the wrong perspective. Web 2.0 is basically a new way of looking at things and doing things. It doesn't mean that you have to launch a whole new site for it. Why not just add it to your existing site.

For instance on one of the site's I've just launched, Bring Back My Favorite Show user's have profiles and will eventually be able to have friends, a simple picture and editable information about themselves. It's a nice feature to add on to the site that would have gone ahead anyway if it hadn't occured to someone to put that kind of features in. It doesn't need to be a stand-alone product. Because when you make it one you're all about the social networking and you're new cool tech start-up is just one in a million most of which will be dead fairly soon.

In quick a quickly closed deal, Google has purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion. Google don't seem to be afraid of taking on lawsuits which is a good job in this case given the amount of annoyance YouTube have caused. Since the deal closed Time Warner are already talking about sueing YouTube and given Google has enough money to make it worth sueing don't be suprise if a lot of lawsuits come their way in the near future.

The rise in user generated content sites has opened one very important avenue for small time content producers and users looking to get a real voice on the web - they have the ability to leverage an existing and indeed very large site's userbase in order to promote themselves.

Yesterday Worfolk Pictures launched their new show, Jimmy Turtlehouse Guitar Hero. The main method of promoting the new show - it's on YouTube, it's on Metacafe, it's on Revver, it's on MySpace, it's on Bebo, the list goes on.

By getting on all the various social networks you are exposing yourself to an audience of millions, hundreds of millions with the biggest sites. And it works. The success of things like Lonelygirl15 that clocks up, up to a million views per video just by sticking it on YouTube.

In exchange of course the big sites that are offering people this voice get a mass of high quality content uploaded free for them to use. Of course there is far more crap on that good content but just consider some of the fantasic quality shows that are on YouTube. Some of them are amazing, almost TV worthy pieces of film that have clearly had a lot of work put into them. And they were given to YouTube free. How much would it cost them to make that kind of content themselves? It's a very sympbiotic relationship.

First look for myself anyway. I installed Internet Explorer 7 RC1 last night to take a look at it. After all it's heading towards a release and with the rumour that it's going to be pushed as a forced updated on XP, it means that soon there will be a lot of users using a browser that I haven't tested compatability with on any of my sites.

The Browser
Ok, let's start off with the browser itself. It's been made a lot slicker. That's a code word for it looks a lot more like Forefox now. The file menu has actually been taken out and now the top of the browser consists of two rows. The first has your navigation buttons, address box and quick search that nobody is going to be using because of how much lock it has on Windows Live Search.

The second row consists of your tabs including a neat little quick tabs page which allows you to preview all of the tabs in little PowerPoint style boxes. Then on the right of that you have buttons for your homepage, RSS feeds, printing, and two drop downs called "page" and "tools" which basically make up the options you would have had on your file menu.

While this creates a lot of space it does reduce the amount of space you have for tabs when you don't have the browser full expanded on a large monitor.

Finally at the bottom you have your status bar which now includes a quick option to magnify the page. It also has a phishing alert icon which regularly incourages you to check if the website you are on is listed in anti-phishing databases. Unfortunatly, the icon that appears to encourage you to check the site actually looks like the site has been flagged and so many users will probably think most of the sites they go on are phishing scams.

How it renders
So far it's looking pretty good. I went down the massive list of my sites and opened them all so while I only saw the homepage they all seemed to look for the most part ok. IE7 seems to really for for the whole anti-alias text rendering as everything on the page seems to have it (or maybe I'm thinking of something else, point is, it looks pretty ;)).

There are still certain problems for example it still doesn't support transparent backgrounds for form lists. Also the only major issue I have found so far is that it seems to be incompatable with the default theme that comes with MediaWiki. It renders the top menu bar on the left and so is hidden behind the logo. MediaWiki have newer versions out which may have fixed that but given the new versions need PHP5 which few webmasters have it looks like it is time for some custom CSS hacking to get that fixed.

Conclusion
I'll need to do lots more testing and playing around before I can really give IE7 a thumbs up (or down) though so far it seems Microsoft have put some time into it. It will be interesting to see how the release of IE7 affects the browser market share.

Come on seriously now, there are two many of them. Every activity, media type, religion, etc, etc now has it's own niche social network. How many niche social networks do you use? Probably very few. Why use any more than one? Ideally we probably would if all our friends were on it and all the features. Nobody wants to use more than one.

Yet for some reason they keep getting funding. People are still putting millions of dollars into these new social network start-ups that offer nothing new. How are they planning to make money? They aren't going to get the traffic. If things continue like this, I can see another bubble that's going to burst.