The Incremental Web
August 16th, 2009 (Tech)So, this is not an original thought of mine, but I thought it was interesting anyway. I was listening to This Week in Google (TWiG) and the panel brought up an interesting article by Anil Dash that proposed the idea that online trends work because they are incremental and the learning curve is weekend-project sized. He brought up a couple of other points, but I thought those two were the most interesting.
Baby Steps…
If you think about it, it takes most people a long time to catch on to new technologies. Google in particular likes to change the interfaces to their products just enough to confuse people who are used to the “standard” interfaces for that product. Gmail for instance shifted the thinking of “folders” to “labels”. Labels offer the same functionality as folders and add more display options. The only difference in Gmail is that you would also have to “archive” a message to get it to leave the Inbox. Honestly, I like the fact that Google rethinks how things have always been done and attempts to make a simpler, more powerful interface.
But, getting back to incremental web technologies, RSS is one of these that is so simple, yet is an enabler, a building block that yields more interesting results as time goes on. An extension of the RSS protocol, pubsubhubbub now allows for a feed (or hub) to ping readers rather than the readers having to check periodically for updates from the feed. As the protocol extends and changes, so are other uses realized for the technology. Podcasts are just audio files with an RSS feed and a reader to check for new ones periodically. So, I wonder if iTunes will adopt the pubsubhubbub extension for more efficient updating?
Google Wave
Anyway, the whole point is that if all this technology came at once rather than the uses for it being built up over time, would it be usable, or would the learning curve be too steep for it to be adopted at all? This is the question I would ask about Google’s Wave. Are we at a point where we can understand how all of this technology can work together in the way that Google deems best? Wave is like a federated wiki for real-time communication. In addition to having a client and server piece, the really cool thing is that it is an open protocol. I guess we’ll find out how open people are to adopting it around Sep. 30th when the first 100,000 invites go out for Wave.
What about you?
So, how do you react to new technology? Are you overwhelmed by too much new tech (it is coming at us much faster in the past 5 years, then it every has before)? Or, do you love living in a world where things are changing and there is always something new to learn? Oh yeah, and will you be using Wave when it is available to the general public?
