The Ajax Myth

Mis-​​Information Week per­petu­ates the myth that Web 2.0 is all about AJAX. The stand­first to the article lays the ground­work, sug­gesting that this is purely about tech­no­lo­gies, when surely approaches would be a better way to begin:

To bring your site into the Web 2.0 world, you need to know about Ajax, ActiveX, RSS, and other key technologies.

As the intro confirms, this brave new world of Web 2.0 is sup­posedly all about appear­ances: “you ignore the new lingo at your own peril; enter­prises that put up plain-​​Jane Web sites today risk turning away the more dis­cerning browsing customer.” But it’s not just about AJAX. Oh no. It’s also about lit­tering your site with point­less bling: clever developers “spice up content and make their sites more dynamic … Use polls, surveys, RSS feeds, and tag rolls.” (OK, I’ll allow them RSS feeds as important).

Only on page four of four is there a hat-​​tip to the idea that the way sites work with users might have the least import­ance: “I also include social aspects and smaller, light­weight com­pon­ents as keys to Web 2.0,” says Tony Karrer, the CEO of TechEmpower.

I have to assume that the piece was either poorly com­mis­sioned or subbed rather heavily, since the author, David Strom, is actually a lot better informed than this piece suggests.

Anyway, back to the point. No, it is not about AJAX. It’s not really about lan­guages at all. You could write an applic­a­tion in fridge magnets and it could still be called Web 2.0 if it meets other criteria (light­weight models, per­petual beta, read/​write access, col­lective intel­li­gence, etc). Yes, a rich inter­face is also an important part of the idea, because that enhances usab­ility — the human angle again, see? And those rich inter­faces are some­thing that AJAX facil­it­ates. But that’s all it is, part of the toolbox. No-​​one, to my mind, has put this point better than Socialtext’s Ross Mayfield:

I’d bet the future is less the Matrix than Soylent Green. Less semantic fuzz than social dis­covery. Less arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence than human intel­li­gence. Less auto­ma­tion and more augmentation.

Soylent Green is a 1973 Charlton Heston movie. At the end, he dis­covers that the new miracle food from the Soylent cor­por­a­tion is made of dead bodies. “Soylent Green Is People!” he bellows to an unhearing crowd in the last line. The same is true of 2.0 applic­a­tions and sites.

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