Archive for the ‘Web 3.0’ Category

Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us

Thursday, February 8th, 2007

This is where the Internet is heading, <a href=”tag-ttp://mypersonaltagmachine” rel=”tag” value=”this is what I wanna do” clickable=”no” priority=”high”>

Web 2.0 is just a stepping stone for the Semantic Web, allowing a smooth transition from the nascent HTML to machine readable data formats.

4 Traits of a successful Web2.0 Development Team

Friday, December 29th, 2006

* Treat Programing languages like soda-water, adds new ingredient (as required) to flavor it up
* People who cannot focus on one thing, when they are alone and not writing code (both criteria inclusive)
* People who can produce at least half-a-dozen new ideas in a 60 minute conversation
* People who live on the edge, who can think ahead at least 2 years from today (but no more than 4-5 years, otherwise they are plain dreamers and not pragmatics)

Web Applications with Portable Data: The next generation of Web applications

Tuesday, November 7th, 2006

Data portability is a big issue. None of us want to get locked down with a particular vendor. All the free web apps like GMail, JotSpot, Writely, et al come with a price — your data is in a proprietary data store. If you are not using pop3 and want to migrate from GMail to some other cool new email application, then there is no easy way out. The vendors rely on the lock-in of this data. For example, Google is offering E-mail services for SMB — what if you grow into a larger enterprise tomorrow and wanna have your own e-mail environment. There is no easy migration. Same goes for other next generation hosted applications like spreadsheets, wikis, office application. For a long time vendors rallied against Microsoft for proprietary formats — Talk about this one!
What’s the solution then? As Fred Wilson mentions:

I think anyone who provides a web app should give users options for where the data gets stored. The default option should always be to store the data on the web app provider’s servers. Most people will choose that option because they don’t care enough about this issue to do anything else.

I think we need a new breed of web applications which have pluggable storage. For example, all you get from a next generation GMail is a presentation and business logic layer. You get an ability to choose your data storage. It should work the way other desktop based applications work — You photo organizing software does not have data store attached to it, all it has a tonnes of logic and uses the file system. You can switch to another application and take care of the business.