roy

Note: This rant below was a part of my incoherent ramblings from late last night. I've since friends-only-ed the original post and posted this separately.

Widgets piss me off like nothing else. The reason I *love* RSS readers is cause I don't have to visit individual sites and wait minutes for the page to finish loading it all its widgets. Case in point: I needed to do a quick calculation on my Mac tower, so I hit F12 to load the Dashboard. Fuck me if it didn't take 30 seconds to load up the friggin' calculator ... cause it was loading all the other shit too (weather, and clock, and all that stuff).

Websites are even worse about this. They just blindly start putting crap up and down the right bars, until the page doesn't load. It almost makes me want to surf the web with Javascript off! Buggers!

See, here's the dirty underbelly of this whole Web 2.0 thing: Working across platforms is great, until it goes down. If one of your ten widgets on your page goes down, your whole page will stop working (unless you've engineering that into the initial implementation, which most of you haven't). If the server is slow, your whole page will be slow. That's just the way it is. It sucks.

Point number 2: Writing a Facebook application is absolutely useless for you, cause when it takes off ... your server will go down in flames. And you'll realize you have to fork over thousands of dollars to keep your site running. The Internet used be for hobbyists ... not anymore. (Not that this is necessarily a bad thing - I think the romanticism of amateurism is a bit silly)

The Internet is just starting to come into its adolescence - that's what the second bubble is about (the first bubble was when the Internet, as a young child, was subjected to every possible extracurricular activity by its overly hopeful parents; now, its the experimental but rebellious/revolutionary phase). The problem now is ... the barriers for entry are getting significantly higher.

Safari got a million downloads for their beta. A MILLION. We're reaching the point where stuff like this is not uncommon. Any new service that launches is going to have to scale from the get-go.

I think I had one more point to make, but I should really get to sleep. I do feel my eyes getting tired ... thank god this worked. Journal = therapeutic.

Edit: I remember the last point I wanted to make. Google's done an exception job with integrating their products - the way they integrate is how we should strive to do it across different sites. However, Google gets a big leg-up in this because all their stuff is internal - if Gmail is slow, they can deal with it internally. The reason why Google is succeeding so well on sites like Gmail, Gtalk, and iGoogle (which is, as far as I'm concerned, the best "personalized" homepage product on the web) is because when they do the integrations, it is fast. I think too many sites are feature/product driven ("We do _____ too!") without thinking about performance.

Friendster failed cause their servers died too often. When people start getting sick of widgets and embedded content mucking their productivity, they'll ditch the product. Even if it's not the product's fault.

But one day, I hope we get the level of integration Google achieved with iGoogle. It is a really cool picture of the web...