The Way of the Web

Welcome back!

The web has been in a state of transition since it began. Remember the first site that you saw, with Times New Roman text and recangular images? We’ve come a long way since then. Broadband and wifi brought a huge leap forward in web technology because sites loaded faster and we were no longer tied to our desks. Then AJAX changed the way we interact with information on the web. Blogs, social networking and social media sites made the web more fun and more useful. Now we want web access on our phones, too.

Over the past several months a new trend has been emerging. The technology changed more than a year ago and the way that we use the web has been catching up. I’m just getting my head around it now, and holy cow is it cool. I’m still grappling with these concepts so please forgive me if this post is a bit janky. I’ll cover some broad trends and then give a couple of concrete examples.

For the past couple of years sites have been displaying data from a number of sources through RSS, that isn’t really new. There is an increasing number of sites that allow users (and other sites) to submit data remotely as well, through API’s. What this means is that you don’t even have to visit a site to take advantage of its services. In some cases the sites, or web applications, don’t offer anything on their own site other than an administration panel. Gravatar is a site that offers a centralized avatar storage and distribution for the rest of the web, all you can do on their site is update your email address and picture. But, once that’s done every website that takes advantage of that service displays your avatar. Similarly, create an account at OpenID and you can access dozens of sites with those credentials. Last.fm keeps track of the music you play on your computer or iPod and gives you tools to display that list on any site you wish, your blog, Facebook, MySpace, wherever. Twitter, Flickr and Delicious also make it a snap to share information on any other site you choose.

There is a shift toward decentralized content, the information that you view on one page could be pulled from a dozen or more places. These mashups are fun and useful, but its not just content that is being shared between sites, now applications are, too. I can think of a few examples for WordPress. Disqus is a blog plugin that replaces, and adds functionality to, your blog engine’s commenting feature. Comments display as threaded, and they extend across similar sites. I have already reviewed Zemanta, which is a tool to help add links, images and related articles to your blog posts.

There are several Firefox add-ons that extend the functionality of Gmail, making it a great alternative to Outlook. RememberTheMilk has an add-on that allows you to see and manage your task list from within Gmail (that’s actually one of my favorites). Xoopit indexes your email and gives you quick access to images and videos that have been sent to you.

Some people are referring to this as the semantic web. The way I understand the semantic web, this is incorrect, though I’m certainly no expert so I don’t necessarily claim to be right. My understanding is that semantic is a way of categorizing the information contained within a web page so that computers can make sense of and utilize that content. I guess maybe this fits within semantic in a general way, though I consider this to be more along the lines of content/application distribution.

This is a pretty exciting trend within web development. As each of these sites/tools develops more ways of interacting with them, the functionality of the web increases. Distributing content across a number of sites increases the chances that someone interested in your words will see them, increasing the value that those pages bring to readers. And, transferring applications to the web opens up a myriad of opportunities as well. I’m excited to be working in this industry right now.