November 5, 2005
@ 10:09 AM
Comments [3]
Web 2.0 yaddayadda AJAX yaddayadda Profit!(?)

Joe McKendrick at ZDNet cites Joel Spolsky and his "Web 2.0" rant.

What is particularly interesting about this new hype-term that this is the first technology term that describes nothing at all about technology. It rather seems to describe that a suffiently large, critical mass of people has grasped a sufficiently broad set of technologies (most of which have been available for the past 4-5 years) for DHTML and XML to actually go mainstream. And clearly contributing to that is (even though everybody seems to complain mostly about IE and its gaps in standards support) that Mozilla seems to have managed to clear the dreaded Netscape 4 garbage off the net.

AJAX is the same buzzword b/s. I am currently building an AJAX app, yay! In order to remember a few things and how they worked, I dug in code dating a few years back that sits in my "OldStuff" directory. Innovation!

And VCs going crazy about this is something that absolutely shocks me.

Categories: XML

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Saturday, November 05, 2005 6:40:37 PM UTC
Of course Clemens is not the only one having worked with AJAX technologies way back in the years before .NET. Remote Scripting and XML islands and XmlHttpRequest (if I remember correctly) and DHTML where cool at their time - but in combination never where able to attract a sufficiently critical mass. Why? Maybe it was because of the then still raging browser wars? Don´t know.

So what does AJAX teach us? I think the clear message is: Technology adoption is not that much a rational process as we might believe. It´s not about whether a technology is available or even superior, but whether its "soft aspects" (or the marketing) have enough appeal.

To learn more about why and when something becomes "hip" or "a hype" or trendy I recommend reading "The Tipping Point" by Malcom Gladwell.
Ralf
Tuesday, November 15, 2005 11:30:59 AM UTC
At least you're not bitter!
Anonymosity
Thursday, December 01, 2005 5:29:06 PM UTC
i was recently using dhtml and xmlhttprequests in my legacy asp code, and yes, as u clearly pointed out nothing new in AJAX. so then, do u think AJAX will formalize or standardise the way we use xmlhttprequest mechanism???

your aspirant from Pakistan Developer's Conference '04, '05
now in germany!
Atif Abdul Rahman
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