We are heading into an era of some pretty incredible developments when it comes to the web. Developments that potentially make what has come before and makes up much of the web we use daily seem like the Dark Ages of the Internet.
No longer are just static web pages an acceptable way of presenting yourself, or your company on the web. It is all about ease of use and interactivity that lets you build a community around your site. Web 2.0 brought with it a whole new design philosophy that emphasized clean lines and speedy load times of pages.
While there are still many sites out there that struggle to hang onto the previous style of glitz and gloss users are making it understood that this kind of time wasting isn’t the right way to be doing things. Blogs were primary in this push for clean, fast and to the point presentation of information. Web 2.0 services highlighted gentle plainness that while hiding the underlying power of the service made it easy to access.
Even with all these advances though the technologies coming down the pipe will combine the best of that simplicity with a whole new breed of ‘instant access and instants transfer’ technologies that could stand the web on its ear. Some, like Google’s Wave, are overly ambitious attempts to totally change how we use the web; while others like The Pushbutton Web seek a more blended approach that will bring about changes but in a much more palatable way.
When I first saw the presentation of the Google Wave I was like a lot of people who rushed to watched the video and then prayed to be accepted into the beta testers circle (I’m still waiting). It was jaw dropping – there is no denying that. It was a totally new way to look at how information could be shared on the web. It rewrote the rules of everything from email to IM to blogs.
As I have had time to sit back and think about the whole idea I am not sure if it is one of those great life changing events that as it stands right now will see the light of day. Like Anil Dash says in a post the other day
And people aren’t looking for a replacement for email, or instant messaging, or blogs, or wikis. Those tools all work great for their intended purposes, and whatever technology augments them will likely offer a different combination of persistence and immediacy than those systems. Right now, Wave evokes all of them without being its own distinctive thing. Which means it’s most useful in providing reference implementations of particular new features.
What we could see is parts of that great idea percolate through the developer community and find homes throughout a whole bunch of different web technologies.
This is for the most part the premise behind another earlier post by Anil where he talks about the Pushbutton Web. The idea here being that small improvements, some radical and some just improvements on older and existing technologies, are much more likely to be accepted and implemented because they are easily understood.
I would like to add that unlike the massive investment in brain time that things like Wave would require these smaller chunks require less of an investment of time to understand or implement. As with all things these days time is a precious commodity so if we can be a part of improving the overall web for ourselves and our readers with a reasonable investment of time that is worth doing.
As Anil concluded in his Pushbutton Web post
I have tremendous excitement about the new realtime era of web applications. While I’m fundamentally an optimistic person, I have great skepticism when it comes to mindless hype about new technologies, so it’s with a bit of reluctance that I indulge in some hype myself. But I think the Pushbutton web has the opportunity to give individuals and organizations with distinct and passionate voices the ability to be even more immediate and expressive on the web, and after ten years of publishing on the web, that’s the part I love the most.
What does all this mean to the rest of us, the readers and the publishers? For some it won’t really make that much of a difference in how they consume their news and information – it’ll just come to them quicker which is a nice bonus. For the producers of content it will mean a little more – especially as all the ramifications of what is capable with something like the Pushbutton Web.
Sure it means initially that our content stands a chance of getting to the consumer quicker. But what about it’s influence on things like chat, or email, or comment streams, or even reader – content producer interaction is ways we have yet to discover.
As we move more into a real-time; which I still have my doubts about, we are going to expect more of the tools we use to take up this real-time mantra. An interesting side note to this was the recent uproar that developed in the WordPress camp when it was discovered that self-hosted WordPress installs as of the 2.8 release had changed the ping timeframe of new posts.
Blogger Christian Bolstad found a new feature in WordPress 2.8, undocumented and not among the release notes in the Codex. Basically, it changes the notification behavior of WordPress, from notifying ping services like Pingomatic and others you might use automatically when publishing a post or editing a previously published post, to doing a once an hour notification using the built-in pseudo cron.
Source: The BlogHerald – WordPress Switches to Hourly Pinging, Tells No One
The basic argument that developed in the heated comments on the post was that it wasn’t the responsibility of WordPress to assure that services be pinged on every new post. It was the feeling that is it more in the realm of feed services like Feedburner to keep that information fresh. Personally I have noticed that since upgrading to 2.8 it is taking longer for my posts to show up on places like Friendfeed.
It would seem that there is still a long way to go before real-time becomes a ubiquitous reality.
