An oddity:
With Google Suggest turned on, if "How to" is entered in the search box, the first option it suggests is "How to tie a Tie".
Now to the post. Ajaxian carried extract from a story about Web 3.0, carrying a couple of puns and names from animation world like Chuck Jones and fantasy things like ACME invisible ink. The author is quite funny, and writing about future or emerging technologies in the manner in which he's done it is no mean piece of writing. And it's only essays like these that are pointers to developers "who are toiling over an AJAX- and Ruby-powered social software product", no matter how sceptical or irritated they feel about it.
"Some small teams of sharp people—people who once, perhaps, worked for those with dimmer visions—are now following their own muses and designing smart web applications." With each passing day, there seems to be some AJAX powered application or the other hitting the new web, I can't agree more. It's actually the liberty that it offers, more people are lured into it everyday. A couple of years back, when sending a batch of image files to a lot of people, was synonymous with attaching every individual file and sending them as an e-mail. And one had to see to it that it wouldn't exceed their storage limit, which was around 4 MB. Later on, Flickr happened and made the life of a lot of people, especially those people who spend their time distributing those odd and interesting pictures a lot simpler.
I wonder if the idea of a concept such as Flickr would have been a success if a Computer Conglomerate which sells a wide variety of software packages decided to develop such an application. Flickr wouldn't be Flickr if it were that way. It wouldn't be human enough. As mentioned, AJAX developers will have to "determine all the things a user might do, and wireframe the blessed moments of each possibility." All those applications that use AJAX almost understand what you want. The tagging service del.ico.us, for instance, tries to predict what tag you can possibly use based on previous user's experience. Gmail sorts the e-mails and their replies in conversation view, instead of making people fish around the Inbox or Mail folders. That is the advantage of having smart people who worked previously with boring projects. They've made the Web almost intelligent. That, precisely is the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. While Web 1.0 had answers that cater to the crowd, Web 2.0 has (or will have, in the near future) a solution that suits the individual user.
It will not be long before the Web tries to understand the possible mistakes that happen while tying a neck tie, and display a warning message in the screen that most probably it was wrong, based on the responses obtained from the previous users who tried to do it by the same method.
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