RSS And Ajax – Is That What Web 2.0 Is?
When I wrote my post RSS: How to integrate feeds into your website with AJAX… I never imagined it would be as popular as it has been. People from all over the world have dropped in to either download the code or comment about it. It’s great to write something that people find interesting and feel that they can make use of as it makes you strive to keep on doing it.
When I check Google Analytics the post mentioned above is always the most popular link. It makes me wonder about the applications and situations that people have utilized its content for. Unfortunately the post is a consume, grab and run affair for most its readers.
This jump in, read, disect and apply mentality is a lot of what is driving the Web 2.0 movement. In knowing just how small this blog is and the amount of traffic my post has received – I can only assume that more professional sites are getting hammered for information about the two main Web 2.0 technologies. Namely RSS and AJAX.
RSS
RSS has been the cornerstone of bloggers traffic generation possibilites for years now and in nearly every popular website you will see reference to it on more than one occasion. The need to distribute content and market yourself all at the one time is key to RSS’s success.
AJAX
The savior of the webpage interface. The ability to update page content without refreshing the whole page and hence downloading less content and causing dramatically less flicker annoyance has cast AJAX to the front of the line when it comes to website/web application development. To say that your site doesn’t use AJAX is like saying there was no need to upgrade from Windows 3.11 for Workgroups.
These two technologies have really launched the term Web 2.0. They epitomise everything that it is. Developers rush to be the first out the door with another way to use the two – yet with no real need for the end application. A buzz is generated around the initial “Oh look what I can do!” and turns into “Hey – you should see what they can do”. This mentality creates the rolling stone movement and all other developers want to match or beat the coolness of the last “company’s” release.
In the end some big companies roll in and buy the main players and the smaller guys pull the shutters down. Then the large companies find they have applications that they dont really know what to do with.
RSS feeds have been pilfered beyond believe by Advert junkies. Simply taking the content from a feed and plugging it into their own sites with ads all around it. Creating enough of these types of sites, all linking together and you’ll end up having better pagerank that the site you stole the content from in the first place and as a result reduce the original authors income and killing their buzz into the bargain. Who wants to continue blogging when they don’t even get credit for their own work.
AJAX is a technology that puzzles me. I think that it has only been so widely accepted because there are no other proper alternatives. Its shocking that we are still programming webpages in HTML at this stage. Javascript is archaic as well. Where are the innovators when you need them? Who is saying “HTML is insufficient for anything dynamic and AJAX is just a service pack release for it”.
It is for these reasons that Web 2.0 is dying. Nothing tangible – just two technologies wrapped up in a little buzz.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter…
Yeah – I find the financial market is also having a major impact on anything technological
Money is increasingly hard to come by now. Funding a new business is to work full time and do the business in the evening!!