Concept 2.0

Facebook have recently relaunched their new look and what does it now really look like? MySpace of course.

Having already had MySpace try to turn themselves into a Facebook clone it would seem that the favour is now being repayed.

WordPress 2.1 is now out in final code format - it's the start of a new stream of product releases with a good handful of new features and more importantly it's not a bugfix on the old one so you don't have to rush to upgrade straight away to keep the hackers out of your box.

While I'm constantly reading about the dozens of web 2.0 social networking sites that launch daily, I rarely hear about them closing down and just generally crashing and burning unless it's major news. But are they are still going? There are so many launched I wouldn't have thought so.

So I think it would be quite interesting to see the failure rates of these sites. I'm almost tempted to set up a site monitoring them to see how long they last.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Now that Adobe has taken over Macromedia and started working on converting Flash to Flex they are pushing it as the next generation media format that is just better than AJAX. They want content publishers building their entire systems on it.

However, I don't think it's the way to go. Flash is great for doing things like streaming videos and adverts and other interactive tools but building entire systems? AJAX is much better at that. Compatability is the obvious issue - a lot of computers don't have Flash. None of the computers in my school at university do. But aside from that, there are plenty of other issues.

The bottom line is, Flash is still proprietary. Adobe still competely control it's development, what platforms it will work on, how the language works, etc. HTML, XML, etc don't really belong to anyone. Sure they are standardised by the W3C but they don't own it as Adobe owns Flash.

Secondly, Flash is still just an embedded element. And browsers aren't good at dealing with them, they aren't supposed to be. Browsers were designed for browsing HTML. If you have a Flash object you can't select and copy text at free will, you can't right click on the page or an image and get the sub-menu you want, all you get is the Flash menu.

Finally, Flex development is expensive. You have to buy the big expensive studio to build applications on the Flex platform. You can code an entire AJAX project in a text editor. You also don't have the bother with publishing the application, you can just open it in your browser. Any text editor, any browser (well almost), any platform and you're good to go, Flex is a much more restricted process.

One of the other things I picked up on while watching Techcrunch's recent Web 2.0 documentary was the idea of what browser you code for. One of the most recent trends is for the new Web 2.0 start-ups to go back to coding for Internet Explorer (and then making it work in Firefox) rather than coding for Firefox and making it work in Internet Explorer which has generally been the done thing since we all moved to Firefox.

It makes sense. Internet Explorer is still holding a 75% market share and this would well be increased once Internet Explorer 7 is released. We can write standards compliant code all we want, the fact is that this is simply the W3C standard. The standard of the internet is still Internet Explorer, by a long way.

There are still reasons to code for Firefox. It's nice to be standards compliant so eventually all browsers can standardise. I also hate my sites looking wrong in my own browser but then that isn't really something you can consider when you are working on a big site as one person doesn't make up a large enough market share (no matter how much time you spend on it :p).

End result is though, Internet Explorer is here to stay at least for the near future and your users are using it on-mass.