Originally posted in the February ITWiki Newsletter, Network World
Web 2.0 technologies are changing the way online solutions are being developed. The popularity of social websites like Flickr, MySpace and Youtube and technology that promotes collaboration such as blogs, wikis, tags and widgets have made Web 2.0 functionality an important consideration for enterprise development. When planning these solutions there are many things to consider. Recent technology advancements have resulted in a flurry of solutions in many categories. The tree will eventually shake out; standards will evolve. Will your project stand the test of time or go the way of the Betamax? Here are 5 things to consider when planning a Web 2.0 solution.
1. Social Networking Standards
There are so many social networks and online communities, social shopping and recommendations, sites for sharing content, and each one with a process to register and manage your profile, interact with members and content. Each site with its own language or application programming interface (API). It’s difficult for developers to learn site specific API’s and then build and maintain applications for multiple sites. A common set of API’s that work across sites would provide a greater use and distribution of applications. Developers could then build and maintain a single application. Continue reading »
There’s a lot of buzz about AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML); but what’s at the center is JavaScript. JavaScript is the world’s most popular programming language. It looks like Java but its much more flexible and works inside the browser. Here’s a few JavaScript leaders to watch.
Spotplex provides Internet users with real-time ranking of blog articles based on actual impression count. In other words, you can find what is the hot news today, this week, or this month in real time at Spotplex. This is not a list of articles people recommended or voted for, but a list of articles read most in a given timeframe.
Bloggers can track and analyze their blog traffic with a simple Spotplex code or widget. Not just how many people visit the blog, they can even find which articles people read most and how many people read them. Whenever an article of the blog is read, it will show up at Spotplex in real-time and get noticed by Spotplex users.
What’s most appealing about Spotplex is built with Ajax and Flash and provides a great Web 2.0 experience. I still haven’t been able to get it to work on my blog - but the UI is so cool I keep trying.
Meebo just released a cool new feature called meebo rooms. Sandy from Meebo calls it “chat rooms on steroids”. Meebo rooms have a built in feature that enables you to create a room, add it to you buddylist (to receive notifications even when you’re not in the room), you can even embed the room on your personal profiles and websites, just like meebo me!
Meebo has integrated some unobtrusive video advertisements and a sign-off ad into the rooms - I was wondering if they’d ever find a way to generate revenue.
With Web 2.0 there’s so many ‘ Long Tail’ possibilities for content that you can result in too many visual elements on the screen. Print, email, bookmarks, comments, trackbacks, tags and metadata. Applying Ajax creatively can allow for a much more focused experience.
Social bookmarking sites are popular these days, allowing alternative (to email) ways to share content. You could potentially display dozens of icons to sites like del.icio.us., digg, furl, Newsvine etc. Scroll to the bottom of the and see how the “Share this” icon reveals a bunch of social bookmarking icons, and email tab. Other tabs could be ‘blog this’ or ‘get code’… Nice way to add a lot of functionality without cluttering the page.
Thanks to Alex King for the ‘Share This’ plug-in for Wordpress.
Today Google launched the Google AJAX Feed API, an API that allows users to develop mashups using only a few lines of JavaScript rather than dealing with complex server-side proxies.
The sample below uses the AJAX Feed API to display a rotating collection of iTunes RSS Feeds.
Pageflakes is an Ajax-based start page similar to My Yahoo!, Google Personalized Homepage, and Microsoft Live. The site is organized into tabs, each tab containing user-selected modules called Flakes containing information such as RSS/Atom feeds, Calendar, Notes, Web search, weather forecast, del.icio.us bookmarks, flickr photos and user-created modules.
Got Widgets?
Now you can make any Flake a widget. Pageflakes provides a code snippet so you can add the Flake to your webpage, blog, MySpace profile etc.
One of the prevalent buzz-words in Web 2.0 is “Ajax”. A term originally coined by interactive design guru and Adaptive Path founder Jessie James Garrett; Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. The idea that without Flash we can achieve “desktop application like” behavior - users can interact without refreshing the page - has become a key design pattern in Web 2.0. Ajax accessibility is a hot topic in the interactive world.
Recent litigation involving the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) may soon have companies scrambling to increase accessibility.The question is how do you make Ajax applications accessible? The answer is Hijax: Progressive Enhancement with Ajax. An approach by Jeremy Keith, author of “DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model”. Jeremy says:
It’s a very simple idea:
First, build an old-fashioned website that uses hyperlinks and forms to pass information to the server. The server returns whole new pages with each request.
Now, use JavaScript to intercept those links and form submissions and pass the information via XMLHttpRequest instead. You can then select which parts of the page need to be updated instead of updating the whole page.
This means that screen readers, text browsers, and mobile devices can still access all the functionality without building separate site versions.
An early pioneer in interactive media, Dean Whitney is a Web 2.0 and Social media technology evangelist. Start-up veteran, President of Garfield Group Interactive a Boston-based digital agency.
Spotplex
