As a rule of thumb, open technologies tend to be more pervasive and longer lasting (especially for the Internet) than proprietary technologies, which tend to bring more advanced capabilities early on. Consequently, Web application developers need to be pragmatically-open, by choosing open technologies whenever possible, but also by not hesitating to use proprietary ones when required. It is not about being religious about openness or anything else, but rather about being diligent so that one is able to choose the right technology to maximize the chances of success of the target application. In other words, it should not be a personal and emotional decision, but rather a business and rational one.

Today, for mainstream rich Web applications, there are two main technologies: Flash and Open Web (i.e., HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SVG, etc…). While SilverLight and JavaFX are definitely interesting upcoming technologies, they are still unproven Web entities, and, for the sake of simplicity, this article will focus on Flash and Open Web.

Having worked for many years on the subject, and having spent time in both camps, I can honestly state that they both have their pros and cons and, depending on your rich Web application requirements, you might even need to use both. The trick to making a good business decisions is to have an objective look at each technology and to strip out all preconceived emotional opinions.

To help answer the question of what to use when, here is a technology-capability matrix, followed by short explanations.

SEO (Open Web)

While Google is making some good progress at indexing Flash content, SEO for Flash is still in its infancy, and, if your application depends on SEO to succeed, you better stick with well known URLs and HTML best practices. SEO is hard enough with regular page-based HTML content without adding unproven SEO-technologies to the mix. Even adding Ajax the wrong way could be extremely damaging to SEO. For example, the “#” URL trick that is used by many single-page Web applications might not be as SEO-friendly as it seems (Ajax and SEO will probably be the subject of a future post).

Mobile Web (Open Web)

Mobile Web is another place where Flash is still behind. Although Adobe is making promising progress in this area, if your are not building a 2D game or  video/media centric application, there are very few reasons to encumber the overhead and uncertainty of another virtual machine on top of the already very capable modern mobile Web browsers. Nowadays, most of the new high-end devices have desktop-like browser capabilities (often based on WebKit) which allow developers to take full advantage of Open Web technologies such as Ajax and CSS 2.1+. Consequently, the best way to maximize your mobile application reach is to stick with Open Web technologies and architect your Web user interface in such a way that it progressively degrades for simpler mobile browsers. Alternatively, developers can to take advantage of the current mobile app stores trend that promotes device specific applications, but this is outside the Web scope of this article.

Rich HTML Display & Editing (Open Web)

While Flash 10 has some technologies which ease the development of HTML layout and editing components, it is still nowhere near the browser’s native capabilities. It is probably a fair guess that Flash 11 will have even better HTML capabilities, perhaps even embedding WebKit, but, for today, if you want to display and edit rich HTML, not surprisingly, the Web browser is your best friend.

On-Demand Performance (Open Web)

On-demand performance is the experience a user gets when accessing a Web application for the first time (i.e., when none of the application assets are in the browser’s cache). The common expectation for consumer Web applications is usually sub-second responsiveness. As outlined in a previous post about Compiled vs. Interpreted Web, the interpreted nature of the Web makes it very efficient for executing on-demand content & interaction, whereas the compiled nature of the Flash application model is more optimized for post-load execution. So, for applications requiring Web-fast first-time interaction experiences, the Open Web model is the best one.

Post-Load Performance (Flash)

Conversely, the compiled approach of Flash and frameworks such as Flex makes it much more optimized for post-load interactions. So, if you do not mind having a “loading-bar” on your application and have a very high logic execution performance requirement, then Flash might be a good solution. Note that new JavaScript VM such as Google Chrome V8 and Mozilla Firefox SpiderMonkey with TraceMonkey are really breaking the barrier of interpreted language performance. Unfortunately, Microsoft Internet Explorer is still behind (even IE 8) in terms of JavaScript execution speed. While we may suspect that Microsoft is going to work on optimizing their JavaScript engine soon, for now, the best way to have high execution logic performance across browsers is with Flash ActionScript 3.

Animation (Flash)

If you want to make pixel flies, then Flash is your best friend. While this statement is still true today, it is also important to note that, with modern browsers (including IE-8-) and Ajax toolkits such as jQuery, applications have access to some decent sets of animation capabilities using 100% Open Web technologies. So, unless animation is a cornerstone of your application, animation alone should not be a critical or decisive factor one way or  the other.

2D & 3D (Flash)

This is definitely a stronger one in favor of Flash. While Open Web is promoting some 2D standards and implementations (e.g., Canvas and SVG), nothing beats Flash performance and capabilities in reference to pixel and vector graphic creation and manipulation. While Canvas and some SVG are pretty well supported by Firefox and WebKit based browsers (i.e., Safari and Google Chrome), Microsoft IE is still not implementing those. Developers can circumvent this Microsoft limitation by using compatibilities such as JavaScript or even Flash libraries, but this usually comes at the cost of features and performance. In other words, while it is possible to do an online Photoshop or Visio-like applications in SVG/Canvas/VML, the investment required to do it with flash technology is definitely worthwhile. Unfortunately, Flash does not support the interpreted model, so Web developers will have to fully jump into the Flash development model and tools, which can be relatively high barriers of entry, especially for small visual components (e.g., Charting). There are some interesting Flash SVG libraries (e.g., sgweb) which allow Web developers to use Flash to rendSVG renderer and the browser JavaScript VM to run the scripts, however this comes at a performance cost.

File handling (Flash)

File handling has always been completely left-out by the different Open Web standardization and implementer groups. Building an effective experience for accessing local files through a Web browser has always been challenging, to say the least. Even the most modern browsers still have the 1995 simple file-input component which allows for the selection of only one file at a time. Flash, while far from being perfect, does add some nice features in terms of this realm, such as multiple file selections and, more importantly, a way to read selected files of clients before sending them to the server. Unfortunately, enterprise Web applications would really benefit from file drag & drop support from and to the desktop (and File Explorer), but, somehow, this feature is always given a very low priority by the various decision makers (or is somehow labeled as a security hazard). Alternatively, you can use Java technology, as does Facebook for their photo uploader, which gives almost complete file-system control for signed applets (note: somehow, it feels kind of strange to write the word “applet” in 2009). Advanced clipboard support is also another neglected requirement.

Video & Audio Playback (Flash)

Two of HTML 5’s big new features, besides off-line support, are the video and audio tags. However, there still lot of discussion about the support format of video tags. One of the biggest issues is that the best video formats are not royalty free, and, while commercial vendors such as Adobe, Microsoft, and Google are willing to pay the video tax for their users, the open source community finds itself in a catch-22 situation. So, from an application developer standpoint, Flash is by far the best option to bring high quality video and audio to your application. With the latest support of H.264/mp4 video support of Flash, there is no good reason to really look elsewhere for now.

Video & Audio Recording (Flash)

I am splitting out media playback from recordings because, if they are not split, the later tends to be forgotten. It’s difficult to believe, but, in the 2-way Web era, the big promoters of Open Web technologies have no implementations or plans to support Web Video and Audio recording and uploading. Luckily, Adobe Flash has a pretty mature solution to this need, and while they have not opened the code, they have opened the APIs and protocols to allow developers to freely use the Flash player as a video recording device (see Red5 for an open source alternative to Adobe Flash Media server).

So, as can be seen, there is no one size fits all technology. It depends on the application requirements you might need to use multiple technology sets. Obviously, as a technology vendor or advocate your goal is to build and promote your technology for as many scenarios as possible, however, as an application developer, your only goal should be to ensure the success of your application, no matter the technology you end up using or switching to. Developers should rationally and objectively evaluate each of the technologies before investing too much time and money in any one of them. Also, avoiding over-hyped terms such as RIA and Social Network when defining application requirements will go a long way to help in terms of focusing on what really matters to users.

If you liked this article, a re-tweet is greatly appreciated.

If you are in the midst of choosing your technologies for your next rich Web application, do not hesitate to contact me at jeremy.chone@gmail.com. (I provide everything from free advice to complete rich Web architecture and strategy consulting and services.)

The Drama: L’Arroseur Arrosé

Popular tech bloggers tend to have an inner capability to manufacture drama, and that is exactly what Michael Arrington did [again] on the Leo Laporte Live video show last Saturday. While Michael was very fast to give his version of the facts on his blog, commenting back has proven to be a little bit harder—at least, it was for me.

To give some context, Leo Laporte was hosting the Gillmor Gang, and when he started to talk about the Palm Pre, Michael interrupted and asked if the device was “given” and mentioned this was an important disclosure to make. Leo got [overly] upset, as he took this interjection as an insult to his integrity, and shut down the show. Michael Arrington then quickly posted an article on TechCrunch showing Leo’s outburst and sharing his view of the incident.

After watching the video and reading the post, I decided to politely, respectfully, but directly share my opinion on the matter.

So, I commented (rewritten from memory, since I do not have the original):

Five minutes later my comment was censored, and I was banned (by email or IP).

I always use my full name (Jeremy Chone), my main email address (jeremy.chone @gmail.com), and I have a static IP address (67.124.145.92 sometime .93). I do not plan to hide, since I always try to be as honest, polite, and respectful as possible. However, my candid opinion apparently was not welcome, and I am now banned from commenting on Techcrunch and can probably forget about any Techcrunch product review for any present or future venture I might have.

While my comment was direct and blunt, I think it was neither disrespectful nor aggressive. I do not always share Michael’s points of view, but I respect what he has built. I like some of the Techcrunch content, and I am a big fan of the ChrunchBase service. I comment from time to time, and this was actually the first time where I openly shared my difference of opinion with the editor. In my comment, I just wanted to make three points.

1. First, that his question was a leading question and directly questioned Leo’s integrity (over a review unit).
2. Second, that his remark was probably stimulated by the fact that he did not get a review unit from Palm (which he might have interpreted as Palm questioning his objectivity—kind of ironic, isn’t it?).
3. And third that “conflict of interest” is often subjective.

For the last point, I used a specific example (the Seesmic/Arrington/Techcrunch potential conflict of interest) which might have been the thing that tipped me to “the dark side.” I actually did not say it was a conflict of interest; I said that I did not know but that some people might see it as one. No conflict at all may exist. Seesmic might have a commercial agreement with Techcrunch, as other sponsors do, or Techcrunch might need the Seesmic add-on to operate its service competitively. I truly and honestly do not know, and since Michael seems very meticulous about pointing out potential conflict of interest to others, I expected to get a clarification. Instead, I just got censored.

The ironic part is that my comment, especially the Seesmic/TechCrunch, was a little bit in the same tone as Michael’s Arrington comment to Leo, and apparently Michael Arrington really did not appreciate getting some of his own medicine.

Two things to conclude the drama part of this post.

First, while I do not always share Michael Arrington’s point of view or style, I do not have any personal animosity against him or TechCrunch and even have great respect for its accomplishments. I just wanted to share my point of view on his topic as honestly and directly as possible.

Second, this post is not a complaint about having been censored but just a reflection about it. TechCrunch is Michael Arrington’s blog, and he is totally within his rights to remove any comment he finds inappropriate on his property without giving any explanation to anyone. In other words, he has the right to censor on his property, even if it he does not like to be cencored himself.

The Content: The Power of Entertainment for Content

Besides the drama, some good content came out of the Leo Laporte incident. After some mutual apologies, Leo Laporte invited the Gang back to talk about the incident and how to move forward. Leo explained that he loves hosting the Gillmor Gang, but that he wanted to remove the drama from their great content. Gillmor responded that the drama was part of the content and that he did not know how to create such content without the drama. It was a great discussion, since everybody was calm and trying to constructively understand the other point of view to build a good solution for their audiences. But how could two extremely smart people not agree on such an apparently basic point?

While I tend to be like Leo Laporte (see previous section, last paragraph), I also recognize the benefits of mixing emotion with content. First, as my friend Bob Buffone put it, “contention drives integrity,” and the right level of emotional involvement is required to build up a constructive debate. Second, and more importantly, I think that we are all becoming more and more entertainment driven. Technology has been driving our society to be overly connected and extremely time sensitive. Consequently, event and information need to be excessively exaggerated to get the appropriate attention and emotionally packaged to get the expected assimilation.

I think the best leaders of the 21st century will be the ones who master of the art of mixing content with entertainment, to provide ultimate and unique experiences for their audiences while quickly and efficiently imbibe their message and product.

In political and world-matter scenes, Al Gore and Barack Obama are great examples of such leaders who have the capacity of making their actions so entrancing. In business, great executives, such as Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison, while different, have the same gift for making their respective company visions a destiny rather than a roadmap. Innovation is also subject to this trend, as Silicon Valley investors tend to prefer investing in high-risk potential phenomenon rather than revenue-centric businesses. Even professional entertainers are now trying to catch up with technologies so as not to miss out on what they have supposedly created. Ashton Kutcher is a great example of this new generation of gifted entertainers who completely embrace new ways of engaging with their audience.

Popular bloggers, such as Michael Arrington, instinctively know this, which is why they always (voluntarily or not) become surrounded by some drama. The reason drama is the main type of entertainment in the blogosphere is that drama is the cheapest form of entertainment to manufacture. While it still takes some talent, just a few well-placed words in a conversation or in a blog title can create some great drama (some bloggers have a sixth sense for this). Other types of entertainment centric content can be much more expensive to produce. For example, the famous Twouble with Twitters: SuperNews! is a very entertaining production (one of my favorite) with some great content in it; however, it is not something someone can drop into a casual conversation or make in an hotel room in front of a laptop. 

So, I do not think that either Leo Laporte or Gillmor were wrong or right. I just think they have two different styles for passing along information. Leo Laporte has a more traditional approach, where content should be king, while Gillmor and many other popular bloggers think that emotion is part of the content.

Personally, I blog for my future-self. I like to crystallize and capture my present thoughts to later assess what I got right or wrong. I am a strong believer of “if you don’t fall, you don’t learn,” and therefore you need to accept being wrong if you want to be right. I genuinely like to be proven wrong; it gives me this warm feeling that I have learned something new. In other word, my blog is my learning tool. Obviously, I am extremely pleased and honored when my articles are read, re-tweeted, and commented on, and I am using this opportunity to THANK YOU ALL. However, I always try to keep emotion out of my content to keep the reasoning as pure as possible.

Anyway, thanks to this little drama, I have discovered another great tech show http://live.twit.tv/. I really like Leo’s style and content choice.

The Experiment: 10x

If my reflection about the power of entertainment for content is correct, this post should be doing extremely well compared to my other usual content-centric articles. It think I could do 10 times as "well" twice as well. My best content articles, such as “Compiled Web vs Interpreted Web”, average 2,500 visitors in the first 48 hours (which I am very proud of). This will make a 25,000 unique visits target for this article. For the fun of it, I am going to set a target of 30,000. (see below for progress tracking)

So, given that this is an extremely small blog compared to Techcrunch and that Michael Arrington will probably avoid, as much as possible, commenting about this article, I need your help. If you are against censorship, think that Michael Arrington should not censor this type of comment, and that he should stop questioning other people’s integrity when he cannot even defend his own, help me to spread the word by Tweeting one or more of the following drama oriented tweets:

#Arrington attacks NY Times integrity but censors when questioned. http://bit.ly/TechcrunchCensors #NoToCensorship http://bit.ly/tooIronic#Arrington If you are not clean, do not spend your time soiling others. http://bit.ly/TechcrunchCensors #NoToCensorship #Arrington cannot take criticism but can censor. http://bit.ly/TechcrunchCensors #NoToCensorship#Arrington, the self-proclaimed paladin of integrity, censors rather than answering. http://bit.ly/TechcrunchCensors #NoToCensorship #Arrington does not take his own medicine very well. http://bit.ly/TechcrunchCensors #NoToCensorship#Arrington accuses but does not accept to be accused. http://bit.ly/TechcrunchCensors #NoToCensorship#Arrington is quick at pointing out conflict of interest to others, but much slower to answer his owns. http://bit.ly/TechcrunchCensors #NoToCensorship#Arrington, upset to not have gotten a Pre, questions host objectivity and censors comment. http://bit.ly/TechcrunchCensors #NoToCensorshipComment about #Arrington, #Seesmic and Techcrunch get censored. http://bit.ly/TechcrunchCensors #NoToCensorship#Arrington hates to be questioned about the potential conflict of interest with #Seesmic http://bit.ly/TechcrunchCensors #NoToCensorship#Arrington, stop complaining about censorship or stop censoring. Cannot have both http://bit.ly/TechcrunchCensors #NoToCensorship

Obviously, you can make your own (I will add the best ones to this article for others to RT). Feel free to use the “http://bit.ly/TechcrunchCensors #NoToCensorship” to keep track of them all.

Also, if you liked this article a +1 on HN, +1 on Digg, are greatly appreciated and here is a more R-Tweet if you feel unconfortable with the drama ones ;).

RT @jeremychone How I got Censored from Techcrunch http://bit.ly/TechcrunchCensors #NoToCensorship

Thank you very much for your support. Michael Arrington can be very intimidating, and the other big guys will probably not support a small guy argument. So, alone I cannot do much, but together we can make a statement. Just Tweet, Digg, Share, +1, Comment about this article and the Internet will take care of the rest.

Article Progress: The race is CLOSED (and it FAILED, postmortem in a following post)

• Target: 30,000 visits in 48 hours
• Time elapsed: 48 hours
• Current page views: 2,746 (FAILED)

Checkout others tweeting about it (and the bit.ly stats), the more tweets the better. Also, feel free to blog about it, this blog follow back.

Although there is evidence that the two styles will converge in the future, enterprise and consumer Web architecture and technology are quite different today. If one talks to an enterprise application architect, he or she will probably say that while consumer Web applications are cute, simple, and sometimes useful, their architectures and technologies are merely a bunch of scripts and hacks put together. If one talks to a consumer Web architect, she or he will probably say that enterprise software is overly complex, often unusable, and based on over-priced and under-performing technologies (i.e., JSF or Portal). (See the previous post about Web Developer Spectrum.)

Having lived in both worlds, I can see some truth in both arguments; however, I think that most of the divergence comes from a different set of requirements that leads to separate technical routes.  

I see six main differences between consumer and enterprise Web Applications:

1) Scale (Users vs Applications)

Scale is probably the first and most important requirement that creates a difference between the two types of applications. Consumer Web is all about scaling the number of users for a single application. Successful consumer applications, such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter have seen an almost exponential growth in their user base. Consequently, consumer Web architects tend to favor license-free technology and often build a customized technology to exactly fit the high-scale needs of such applications. A good example is Google File System, for which architects built a distributed file system.

On the other hand, enterprises usually have a relatively fixed number of users (which can unfortunately shrink from time to time), but they have ever growing business application needs. The biggest challenge for enterprise IT is to standardize technological architecture and best practices across their application portfolios to minimize application development and maintenance costs. Therefore, enterprise developers tend to favor standard and well-supported technology, even if it carries significant licensing fees. Maintenance is often favored over architectural elegance and performance, and technologies such as JSF, SOA, and Portal often bring the wanted risk/benefits tradeoff.

2) Experience (Simplicity vs Functionality)

The second big difference between an enterprise and consumer Web application is experience. In the consumer world, applications have to be simple and engaging since nothing but the application attracts users. So simplicity is king, and often the less functionality the better. I actually think that the success of Twitter over FriendFeed is mainly due to its simplicity (see FriendFeed vs Twitter). YouTube, Flickr, and many other successful consumer Web applications are great examples showing that simplicity often overcomes completeness.

In an enterprise environment, however, users are employees who depend on an application to perform a specific job. While enterprise applications need to be intuitive and well designed, functionality is king. Limiting application functionality for esthetic is probably not a good enterprise IT strategy.

Interestingly, both camps often make the mistake of putting too much emphasis on Look and Feel aspects and confusing these attributes with usability. As explained in my previous Flying Pixels post, good looking is not necessarily smarter. Most successful Web applications (i.e., Facebook, YouTube, Craigslist, SalesForce.com) have relatively plain but utilitarian user interfaces.

3) Security (One for One vs One to Many)

While both application types need to be secured, the security requirement in the enterprise context is much higher than in the consumer case. In the consumer Web, users usually set one access rule per artifact. For example, when publishing a video on YouTube, you can set it as private, for your friends, or for everybody.

In the enterprise case, you often have many rules for a given set of records that are dependent on complex access rules based on groups, roles, and time. This is one of the reasons that enterprise applications usually use a relatively complex but complete security framework such as Spring Security.

Nevertheless, one common requirement of both enterprise and consumer Web applications is the single sign-on. In the consumer Web, Open Auth and OpenID seem to have gained some momentum while the enterprise is using a mix of proprietary technology such as Oracle Sign On and open source and standard solutions such as JOSSO and Liberty Alliance.

4) Transaction (Decoupled vs Complete)

In a consumer Web application, the most efficient way to scale is to partition and distribute data and logic across many low-cost servers. The pitfall of using such a distributed architecture is that transactions can become quite costly and even practically impossible to implement on a large scale. It’s one thing to have Oracle RAC or Java JTA on a few servers, but it is another story to have it cut across hundreds or even thousands of servers.

Therefore, most consumer Web applications implement what I call a decoupled-transactional model in which a transaction gets split into smaller independent transactions that are executed separately, leaving an opportunity for the system to include some stale data. For example, when an artifact gets deleted, added, or modified, the item modification transaction is often decoupled from the relationship modification ones. The trick is to design the system so that 99% of the time the user will not notice the stale data and that stale data never results in wrong subsequent transactions (for example, preventing an eBay user from buying a deleted item). Most consumer Web applications have their own custom loose-transactional implementations, which are often a mixture of caching, cron-jobs, and fix-transaction tricks.

In the enterprise Web, the requirement is completely different. There is usually no tolerance for stale data, and the system must guarantee complete transactional integrity. Expensive but reliable technology such as Oracle RAC can make a big difference when the enterprise needs to scale a given application.

5) Integration (Loose vs Strict)

Another area in which consumer and enterprise requirements differ is application integration. In the consumer space, application integration happens very organically. Application providers (e.g., Twitter) or application container providers (i.e., Facebook) define interfaces with which everybody can integrate. The result is that thousands if not hundreds of thousands of applications will potentially integrate with some of these interfaces. Consequently, interfaces tend to be simpler, lighter (e.g., REST), and often even client-centric (e.g., OpenSocial and iGoogle). In other words, consumer application integration is about breadth rather than depth.

In the enterprise space, on the other hand, application integration has to be thoughtfully designed and managed and often has an impact in all layers of the application (i.e., presentation, logic, and data). Heavy and expensive technology, such as ETL, SOA, JMS, and Portal, are often an effective way to establish strong integration between applications.

6) Search (Page vs Data)

The last difference is related to search. In the consumer Web, the main search model (e.g., Google and Yahoo!) is page-based. A page is a uniform way to represent content, presentation, and relationships for a given entity. SEO is a well-defined concept that helps Web content and application providers to structure their information to be easily discoverable. One great benefit of this approach is that search is application independent.

In the enterprise Web, search is record-centric, and users do not search pages but records with all their associated attributes (e.g., Access Control). The benefit of this approach is that search is more targeted and secure. However, the biggest caveat about using this approach is that search becomes inherently application-specific, making cross-application search a relatively expensive solution to implement.

So we have looked at the key architectural differences between consumer and enterprise Web applications. The good news is that I think the “software as a service” (SaaS) growth will drive convergence. SalesForce.com is a great example of how a consumer-inspired Web architecture can be tailored to enterprise needs. I also think that Open Source is, and will be, playing a bigger role in the consumer/SaaS Web than it did in the enterprise Web.

However, by design, tagging requires users to have some sort of writing privilege, which greatly limits its reach potential. Practically speaking, it means that if a user wants to tag an item on a system (e.g, Youtube, Flickr, or delicious) he or she must have an account on that system and be logged in at the time of the operation.

While this is probably not an issue for major Internet services, it can be a chicken-and-egg issue for new, upcoming services that do not yet have a large enough community to build a meaningful tag cloud. How can a new service maximize its community tag cloud if it doesn’t yet have a community?

Here is where the concept of Search Oriented Tagging comes in. The concept is that users do not tag anymore but just search. The service will extract keywords from the search query and track the user’s interaction with the results. The system will then apply statistical logic to automatically tag the interacted entities.

Although this approach is not intended to be a substitute for traditional tagging, it can also complement tagging mechanisms for large community sites.

Search-oriented tagging offers these benefits:

• Maximizes tagging participation: By transforming tagging into a registration-free functionality, search-oriented tagging maximizes its reach to the service’s full audience (i.e., registered users and visitors)
• Scales with the community: Search-oriented tagging’s statistical nature scales well with site content and community growth.
• Search synergy: Since the function is search-centric, this form of tagging can refine the search relevance logic.
• Time-sensitive: Since search-oriented tagging is more transparent and pervasive, it can better capture time-sensitive tags such as "harmony," "Google Chrome," or "lipstick on a Pig."

I am sure that this concept is not entirely new, and that search engines have similar logic to improve their results relevance. However, by applying this concept to tagging, new services can more effectively build a relevant tag cloud while developing their communities. The concept can also be applied to large community services to make their tagging systems more agile and time-sensitive.

If you aware of any services that are using this mechanism, feel free to submit a comment.

While slick animations and transitions are certainly useful for emotionally driven applications, such as car configurators, and some applications or components such as Google Map and charting, they should not be used as a substitute for a good interactive design. Application developers need to realize that these animations and transitions come at an extra design and development cost (no matter what tool they are using). 

In fact, the most successful and influential Internet consumer applications (e.g. Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, Craigslist, Facebook, FriendFeed, and YokWay) use animations and transitions relatively lightly.

In the desktop and mobile arena, Apple has become (and probably always has been) the most famous and admired pixel maestro. However, it is important to note that screen orchestration is a new art and comes at a cost. Even in Apple’s case, flying pixels come with a feature cost, whereas iPhone users can very elegantly scroll their contacts but cannot search them, and can slide from application to application but cannot cut and past between them.

Obviously, the point here is not that including animations and transitions is a bad practice, but that the animations and transitions need to be carefully and thoughtfully considered and planned. So, here are the good, the bad, and the five rules about flying [your pixels]:

The good

• Natural Feel: In the real world, things do not disappear and reappear as they used to do on computer and mobile screens. As shade and gradient are making shapes easier on the eye, animations and transitions are useful techniques to bring a more natural feel to the application.
• Visual Continuity: Good animations and transitions for some types of information can dramatically improve their access (e.g., maps and multi-level charting).
• Perception: Perception is everything, and nowadays a couple of flying pixels can go a long way toward obtaining some good marketing/user buzz and management visibility. iPhone without the flying pixels would not be iPhone.

The bad

• Distraction: Users can be overwhelmed by too many flying and flashing pixels, and developers can spend too much time animating them. The order of priorities should be: first, interaction design; second, visual design; and finally, “orchestration design.”
• Perception: Cool flying pixels might give a false sense of design quality when, in fact, they can hide some serious design flaws or even deteriorate the real use of the application.
• Costs: Flying is not free. First you need your team to learn new APIs, tools, and, sometimes, languages, and secondly, you need to acquire good screen orchestration design skills. Making moving parts feel natural is not as easy at it might seem (even with the right tools and APIs)

5 rules about flying [your pixels]:

• Hire a pilot
• Fly when you need to, not when you can.
• Fly from A to B, not A to A.
• Don’t fly too high — it might suck out all your oxygen.
• Don’t forget to land.

My belief is that animations and transitions are like lipstick; the good ones are the ones you do not notice… except if you are selling lipstick, I guess.

Current Web application model limitations:

For technology providers, although the cost of development of a internet service might be relatively low, operational costs, mostly related to bandwidth and storage, severely limit what can be offered to users. For example, providing an entirely free mainstream photo, audio, and video sharing Internet application would require continuous investment that would be hard to justify outside of an monopolistic business strategy.

From the user’s point of view, while the "zero install" feature of the Web application model is advantageous, it also has the drawback of a "zero memory" limitation (at least as it relates to Internet requests). This means that an interrupted transaction (i.e., Internet request) is a lost transaction. While this is not really an issue for small requests (e.g., eBay bid, craigslist post), it could be quite frustrating for users performing more involved tasks, such as sharing videos.

Also, although today’s new Web trend (Web 2.0) encourages the social aspect of these services, I think that most of the current Web 2.0 applications are still primarily focused on the "tech-savvy" population and have not yet reached the "mainstream." One of my current explanations for this assumption is that "mainstream" users tend to prefer participating with their adjacent network first (friends and family) first, which has been cumbersome given the current proliferation of user identity silos.

Web 2.0 Limitations

P2P Opportunities:

While P2P is definitely not the magic pixie dust to solve all of these problems, combining the P2P paradigm with the traditional Web application model could open the door to many interesting innovations and offer the following advantages:

• Reduced operational cost: By the very nature of P2P architecture, P2P technology providers can offload most of the service processing to their end-users, allowing providers to just centralize what matters to them most (usually the directory service), while offering more attractive services to their users. For example, Skype’s P2P approach was probably a big factor in their exponential growth despite their relatively modest financial investment.
• Illusion of continuity : While this is not really a P2P attribute, most of the P2P clients, such as Skype, instant messengers, and file sharing applications, usually support some sort of "transaction recoverability." This means that the client application is usually able to remember an interrupted request and restart it where it left it.
• Network of proximity: One great feature of all IM clients is the "buddy list", which allows users to easily communicate and share with their close network, such as friends and family. I personally think it would be a great step forward if this paradigm could be carried into the user’s Web experience.

As with all technologies, there are many different ways these types of functionalities can be delivered to users. It could come from a better and deeper integration between existing P2P clients, such as Skype or BitTorrent, with existing Internet browsers. Third party browser extensions, such as the promising AllPeers Firefox extension (profiled by Techcrunch), seem also to be headed towards this goal. Or, lastly, it could come from a revolutionary all-in-one client, similar to Groove, but geared for the consumer market.

Related links:

• Great Allpeers article (from Allpeers’ blog) about extension vs standalone.
• Some Skype P2P pitfalls on Om Malik’s blog.
• An interesting take from Muli Koppel about Skype and Web 2.0.

To pre-order the Buzzpad 2.0 (BETA), just digg-it.

Support this project by digging it up.

Ray Ozzie has just introduced a protocol-extension for synchronization called ”SSE” for “Simple Sharing Extension”. He describes SSE as "the RSS of synchronization". This is a great step forward for the Internet for the following reasons:

• SSE adds an overdue functionality to the Internet: Synchronization.
• SSE is just an extension to open protocols (RSS & OPML) and not another XML protocol.
• SSE is designed to be as SIMPLE as its "host" protocols (RSS & OPML).
• Microsoft seems to be fully committed to promoting and supporting this new protocol (probably thanks to Ray Ozzie). Proof of concept seems to be up and running at Microsoft.
• The technology is available under an open licensing agreement (Attribution-ShareAlike from Creative Commons and is "patent friendly".
  From Microsoft SSE Specification: "As to software implementations, Microsoft is not aware of any patent claims it owns or controls that would be necessarily infringed by a software implementation that conforms to the specification’s extensions. If Microsoft later becomes aware of any such necessary patent claims, Microsoft also agrees to offer a royalty-free patent license …"

This protocol-extension is a great addition to RSS and OPML. The distributed nature of the Internet architecture requires such a multi-directional synchronization mechanism. Unfortunately, it has been a great challenge to find the right balance between simplicity and completeness for such protocols. Ray Ozzie’s expertise (with Notes & Groove) and dedication create a high level of user confidence in this new proposal.

As Ozzie mentioned, while there are plenty of synchronization protocols available (inside and outside of Microsoft), they have not been utilized as much as they should have been. Their complexity might have been a primary reason. For example, SyncML, while a very successful protocol, has seen some challenges to its objective of growing beyond the PIM space.

So far, the buzz from this proposal has been pretty positive. Dave Winer gave some good background information on his blog on November 21st. Mike Arrington from TechCrunch sees some new business opportunities for product development. Another good explanation of the technology can be found at gabbr.com.

Again, this shows Microsoft’s determination to catch this new Internet wave. It is also enlightening to see how the Internet evolution seems to cause "corporate technologists" to realize that simplicity often overcomes completeness. Microformats vs OWL/RDF, PHP vs .Net/J2EE are other examples of this inevitable Internet simplification phenomenon. It will also be interesting to see how “SSE” will play with other standards such as SyncML, CalDav, and other XML protocols.

Anyway, for now, here are couple of things I would love to see come out of this technology:

• Synchronize my del.icio.us bookmarks with Mozilla Firefox (2 Way synchronization)
• Synchronize  Flickr sets with phpGallery albums.
• Provide access to "distributed NotePad" ("NetPad") which will keep my personal notes in sync across devices, desktops and online services.
• And obviously, allow me to share my "family calendar" with my wife. However, I will need to buy her one of these new digital paper notebooks.

Although this model has created some great Internet companies (Amazon, Ebay), it also created the dot-com saga that we know all too much about. Even for companies with good ideas, putting the “Buzz before the Bits” could be very costly.

In today’s internet (often referred to as "Web 2.0"), the environment has changed dramatically, and has become much more favorable to innovators. Three main factors have contributed to this change:

• Extremely low cost of infrastructure: In contrast to the early days of high start-up cost, today’s “commoditization” of infrastructure hardware and software allows entrepreneur to start with just an idea, skills, and time. It is probably clear that this new era will not have the same effect on Sun that the dot-com era had.
• Abundance of technical information and tools: Thanks to open source and advanced search capabilities, the abundance of available technical information and tools is unprecedented. This significantly reduces the cost of development and deployment, and allows start-ups to just focus on their core ideas.
• Past experience: The dot-com experience has brought a lot of wisdom and some humility to the technology industry. Entrepreneurs view their ideas with much more objectivity now, and often know from the start if an idea would be better as a stand-alone business or as complement to another service. VCs have become more prudent about investing as a result as their painful dot-com experiences. Angels avail of some very mature processes and forums in which to evaluate early ideas.

Consequently, innovation has become cheaper and investors have become wiser. With innovators doing more to drive process. This, ultimately is a good thing for everybody, including investors.

This reduction in the cost of innovation, coupled with new challenges of creating a long-lasting businesses (see VC Squeeze from Paul Graham), is pushing entrepreneurs to evaluate the “flip” strategy (selling to a Google, Yahoo or others) before even talking to venture capital firms. The Riya-Google Rumor from Techcrunch might be the latest example to date.

All of this is not to say that venture capitalists are not adding any value. Actually, they add a great deal of wisdom due to their memory of the dot-com bust. In a great panel about Internet 2.0, Josh Stein of DFJ pointed out that many of the ideas of 1999 could be good inspirations for today’s market. Indeed, we are seeing many of them resurface. It is probably fair to say that many of the dot-com ideas were too early for their time, and that Web 2.0 might be the right distribution for many of them. Only time will tell, I guess.

In short, Internet Innovation is back on, more innovative and more "free" than ever. This is a very exciting time, and great things will come out of it. So, we should enjoy the wave and give the best of ourselves.

Some good examples of AJAX applications are GMap, Google Suggest, Interactive Domain Search, and Windows Live.

On the technical side, AJAX is a term describing an approach at developing more interactive Web applications. Although AJAX might look like new technology, AJAX technologies have been around for a while. So, what made AJAX such a sudden phenomenon? And, why now?

The natural first explanations are technical.

• One could say that browsers were not powerful and flexible enough to support these types of applications. However, most of the AJAX applications run on Microsoft IE (MS-IE) 5, which was released in 1999. Mozilla 1.2, the first robust modern browser, was released in 2002.
• Another argument is that the PC has become more powerful and therefore, has enabled users to take advantage of these new processor-demanding applications. However, AJAX applications do not consume that much processing, and the end-consumer PC market has not evolved as fast as the popularity of these new applications.

While these technical reasons are valid to some extent, the main factors for this recent trend might be more of a social nature and the result of a good timing of confluent events. I see the following three main “events” as catalysts for this new trend:

• A name (AJAX): Jesse James Garrett did a great job at naming and describing an approach to building new Web applications. This has allowed the industry to have a common understanding and terminology about these technologies.
• The perception of feasibility (Firefox): MS-IE 5.0 was too Windows-centric to be the only bet for mainstream Web spplications and Mozilla 1.2, while sufficient, was not recognized as a valid alternative. Consequently, the majority of the Web stayed with the lowest common denominator. Fortunately, the fulgurant Mozilla Firefox popularity growth reestablished developer confidence in MS-IE alternatives and "re-balanced the Web" toward standards and true cross platforms.
• Proof of concept (GMap): One of the most future-looking internet companies, Google, released a dazzling mapping "AJAX" application to the public (GMap). This was the best validation of the AJAX approach… probably to date.

It was fascinating to witness these three events happening almost in perfect harmony. I guess it was such a needed evolution that everybody naturally did their part of the puzzle.

In any case, this new approach is a much needed update for many current Web applications. It will interesting to see if the innovation will come from the incumbent or newcomers. So far, with the exception of Google, most of the real innovation in this space has come from startups. However, with Yahoo and Microsoft in the race, this might change.

Honestly, AJAX does not solve all Web application limitations. For example, Offline, Desktop Integration will still require some sort of plug-ins…which are very browser dependent…there is no free lunch…except at Google, I guess.

It is very interesting to watch Microsoft waking up, loud and determined as in 1995. The fact they chose Windows and Office brand for their "Live" offerings is significant.

A few interesting points from the Ozzie memo:

• Microsoft did openly recognize having missed some opportunities (e.g., Google, Skype, AJAX).
• They are puzzled about Google’s strategy:
  "[Google's] myriad initiatives … drive scale for their advertising business … or … grow to substantively challenge our offerings"
  (BTW, good job from Google. In less than a decade, they puzzled Microsoft)
• Ozzie did a good assessment regarding today’s Web hurdles:
  "User identity and cross-service interoperability mechanisms are still needlessly fragmented".
  (I hope this means Microsoft will work on standards and interoperability, instead of creating another proprietary Identity Management "a la MS-Passport"!)
• Regarding my previous point about this new advertisement revenue potential, Ozzie did confirm that "… no one yet knows how much of the world’s online advertising revenues should or will flow."
• Ozzie does point out the value of the Internet adoption model and seamless application integration.

Microsoft is certainly doing the right thing by embracing these changes. During the last couple of years, a lot of "underground" work has been done to come to this point. It will be interesting to see Microsoft catching up. Undoubtedly, they can catch-up on the technology side. Their real challenge will be adapting to these new business models.

Some missing points from Ozzie’s memo (just for speculation sake):

• No mention of Open Source. Ozzie could have said that Open Source is part of this new ecosystem. He probably wants to tackle this topic offline.
• Ozzie did explicitly mention the term AJAX couple of times, but not Web 2.0. Arguably, Web 2.0 encompasses AJAX. Free speculation: Microsoft might be starting branding MS Live "against" Web 2.0.

Related links:

• Dave Winer publishes Gates and Ozzie memos.
• On Slashdot -
  Why Microsoft and Google are Cleaning Up With AJAX
• Marc Benioff’s retort

The reference is also well done:

• If you are using Firefox, you are asked to download the Google Toolbar.
• And if you happen to use IE, your are pointed to a "Firefox with Google Toolbar" bundle package.

Today, Opera and Safari users will be pointed to the "Firefox with Google Toolbar." It will be interesting to see if Google will open up its referral program to other browsers.

I am sure we will see more from the Google-Mozilla alliance, and I am definitely looking forward to Google-Firefox, part III.