Trilight Zone

[tricore]

Talking everyday with several people around the world on much talked web 2.0 and bubble 2.0 things i was today brought to stop and think by a novoice user in latin america. Angela runs a spa center in her city with all services what spa can offer and loves her traditional way of marketing. Web is something trendy thing for her. She do have a website which is more like a print catalougue and less like a web. When she decided to see what web can do for her she first digged the net on Craigs list (I dont know why not google) and asked if someone can help her. I am not a regular user of craigs list and I am not American either way so my interest about Americans day to day lifestyle has to be limited. Being a webmaster and in an era of web 2.0 I have started interacting more and more with people around the world. What they like what they don’t and what they would like to see more. For the fact most of the people like services offered by Flickr Youtube and MySpace co-incidentally all web 2.0 sites. They aren’t aware that it’s called web 2.0 and it’s something a big revolution that’s bringing more corporate houses to go serious about it or something. They just love being there.



Angela had a very basic question she said she has got a link and wanted to share with one of her friend and the link is not opening at the other end. If something like this would have asked to me around two years back I would have said "I don’t know what’s wrong there" today it was a clear thing for me. It was not a static links. Static links Haaa Haaa. I remember how oyl emphasized on static urls once for getting good positions for SEO. Our first few sites were completely static with a real page and a real URL on it. Agreed that it helped a lot on getting cached in Google without any risk and straight crawl. It further helped us entering metadata for each page and that way getting rankings in search engines for small sites. The real problem arrived when few of our clients asked to get their big sites with many pages in top. A simple and only option was making the sites CMS based and concentrating more on the contents and not the metadata. But she always prefers Static and we both settled on automated site on CMS with a facility to add metadata for individual pages. It’s around nine month’s old story. The Google has changed the way they crawl the data tremendous in last 9 months and sticking to static pages is like loving a 486 DX4 machine with 32 MB Ram and expecting to pay doom3 on it. Rights Ridicules. People those still believe on static pages are doing a big mistake which they must have started realizing by now. My simple take on the search engine positions is to add and keep adding more and more contents. The old contents should be kept in the archival area and new should be added. The site should have forums blogs and wikis to make users to contribute there and making the site big. A tiny little application wordpress even understands that.



Ok so the static links they aren’t in fashion anymore. I asked Angela what’s the link is about and she said it’s a Google map link. Well sure she was using her browsers address bar link and not the map window which has got a facility to have exact link there. The scene was producing frustration for her since she wanted to show her location desperately and on the other end it was showing another area. I simply asked her to copy the "other link" and try it on her other computer. Now this was something which HAS to work but I asked her to try to just make assured. I then asked her to paste an address bar link there and she got what the problem was. Solved!



Now to be serious. (Like I am addressing my team back at Adlabs) who is to be blamed here? Well Google Off course! (Some one must have replied like this) and I would have replied. NO. Google is a smart company; they have a whole freakin department for User experience and even a VP for it. What about the small teams who are developing web 2.0 applications? Links generated by AJAX aren’t the termagant links. They are all product of the particular user using the system.



AJAX as "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML" No an Ajax application is do something beyond the server side and produces depending on the user preferences for one simple reason "The user is never staring at a blank browser window and an hourglass icon, waiting around for the server to do something," said Jesse James Garrett, co-founder of San Francisco-based Web consultancy Adaptive Path LLC., in his widely cited article propounding the AJAX label."



So a quick notes for all the people who will be hanging up with next generation web 2.0 advice and business sites I am doing

1) "AJAX applications inevitably involve running complex JavaScript code on the client. Making that complex code efficient and bug-free is not a task to be taken lightly," Garrett warned in his AJAX essay.

2) Developers should also consider the performance implications: I really loved the idea "Shame on us if this site is not getting loaded in 30 seconds" but thirty seconds of whom? 80% of the users who have Broadband and DSL? Bandwidth is not issues anymore look at the success of youtube and for god sake stop worrying about processor speed, ram, or even the cooling fans fit on the processors

3) We had great advantage of validating sites for static pages using W3 validations. Unfortunately there are no certain standards for AJAX yet but surely before you send anything from Productions servers to live servers see your site as a novice user make sure people are still using web 1.0 or the classic web

4) The real challenge is the conflicts of the users who don’t know anything about web 2.0. They still see web 2.0 sites as something trendy sites and they think its all like other sites but just have different fonts and color schemes

5) Agree that Ajax is a new thing and most of people are developing for the first time or just since couple of months on it. XML and JavaScript are NOT. If you have used xml and JavaScript since long and understands the beauty of it then just keep it mind that you are putting two different beautiful things together like two best Hollywood male actors. 9Not sure about female actors I don’t know what will happen BTW Midday Mumbai has stopped using word actress)

6) Google is not EVIL but it’s just not EVIL yet. AJAX is really not a monopoly of Google and the more success of it depends on the things outside Google but remember Google has one more department for the security and who knows may be VP for that (I don’t know) you don’t have any security department here in most of chances. Make sure the code is Secure. W3 standards were just not the usability standards but it somehow justifies the security too. Keep that in mind.