For a lot of people, Web 2.0 is a buzzword, i.e. used to "impress people with the pretence of knowledge" [Wikipedia]. There are snake oil salesmen in every bazaar, but there really is a wow factor at the core of Web 2.0 -- Web 2.0 is what I call a transformational principle, or more simply, a transformer, in that it requires a step change in the thinking about how business gets done. For Web 2.0, it's the cumulative change that has steadily occurred in the last 5 years. This is why it's so important for businesses to sit up and listen.
There are tonnes of articles out there that try to cover all the possible ways in which applications could possibly be labelled Web 2.0 -- but to me, the most interesting unique and importantly highest impact aspects of Web 2.0 also happen to be two passions of mine: rich user experience and democratic empowerment. In this entry I'll wax lyrical a little about the first, rich user experience and its companion, the Rich Internet Application (or RIA).
I've always loved interface design. Heck, you can't help it if you learn to program on a Mac which I did back in the late 80s. Bruce Tognazzini (Apple Human Interface god) was my inspiration with his two books Tog on Interface and Tog on Software Design, followed very closely by Jakob Nielsen and Donald Norman. This led me to the company I cofounded back in New Zealand in the late 1990s, Musick Point Software having a User-Centred Design service offering. I spent a lot of my time dreaming about the craft of interface design -- how to create software that gave you that warm, fuzzy feeling you get when using something has been a labour of love, where a lot of thought, effort and care has been invested. So I know interface design well, and I know about the importance of user-centred software design.
Highly usable interfaces can and have been designed inside web browsers. But fundamentally, they've had almighty limitations due to their original intent as text browsers. For an end user, they've won in many ways (e.g. what installation?), but at its core, the web browser's user interface toolkit (HTML forms) has been a spectacular retrograde step. Change a button's state as you type? Woah baby, that's unthinkable. Forget the fact that you've been able to do it in desktop applications for oh, at least 15 years! This whole idea of a 'web application' was coined, fundamentally to describe and work around these incredible limitations. And, because of the other advantages people gained, things went reasonably well. Yes it took friggin' ages to build a form because you had to get a designer to draw a picture of a button and then add a bunch of javascript that worked in 47 different browsers just to simulate highlight, but hey, that's all there was. And it was nice getting designers involved, they'd been asked with multimedia CD ROMs but not other desktop apps.
But then I saw the Oddpost email client back in March 2002. I'll just quote what I wrote back then as there's really not much else to say about it:
To describe it as an online mail reader, which technologically is exactly what it is, would be missing the point.
Oddpost is the first practical online web application with a desktop-quality user experience.
You click to launch; very quickly a real gui appears, with real menus,
drag and drop, inline editing, multiple selections, all super quick.
It's all real! It couldn't be much better if it were a local app. It's
a superb achievement.
For me this is so key: they have not innovated in functionality; nor
even have they innovated in user experience! All they have done is set a precedent for the user experience quality of web-based tools. Quite simply no one has seen this kind of quality before. This is the Internet Explorer for Windows Killer App, if in fact it needed it.[you must remember in 2002 there was no Firefox - JRH]
Web guis for web-based tools have been too long in the dark ages!
Everything about using traditional HTML for user interface widgets has
been fundamentally flawed due to its history. Don't get me wrong, there
are some great workarounds, and it's set incredible precedents but HTML
still is only good at what it was designed for: content presentation.
My feeling is that this is going to set precedents everywhere. The ante
has been upped, and this has a profound impact on any other browser and
platform. And I bet mail.yahoo.com and www.hotmail.com are quite
interested as well. Can this app be ported to other platforms and
browsers? If not, why? Remember it doesn't have to use the same
technology; just has to present the same user experience; can this be
done in Gecko? Why not? That's the big question people will be asking
now. Welcome to Internet User Experience 2.0.
As I predicted, Oddpost was subsequently bought by Yahoo, and is now Yahoo's rich email client (in good Web 2.0 form, still beta), which looks very similar, except is more portable as, again as I predicted, they ported it to support Gecko (the core engine used by Firefox). But the point is, it made me realise that we were in 2002 at the dawn of an age where this retrograde step in user experience was being restored back to its full desktop application glory: most importantly, the glory of 'live' interaction, where you drag or type stuff and get instant feedback. We're there now; this is what I mean when I say Web 2.0 is the manifestation of a rich user experience -- and what a rich internet application (RIA) is: it's simply what users had 15 years ago! It's a shame it's taken so long, but it's very exciting to rekindle the fire of rich user experience creativity that is now open to the world on the web.
In future articles, I'll open up the bonnet to describe how RIAs work a little: how Ajax / Javascript compares with Flash, Flex, and some thoughts on Microsoft's upcoming Flash/Flex killer, 'Windows Presentation Foundation / Everywhere' or WPF/E (catchy innit).
Further reading
No mucking around -- read the seminal texts on What Is Web 2.0 by Tim O'Reilly (who coined the term for a conference they were designing):