Great article from Salon on the WWW – mentioning its current state and where we are all headed. I have no doubt that careers in this space are safe. As broadband speeds and penetration increase more sites will create an experience that replaces traditional software.
Odes to the World Wide Web inevitably burst with superlatives. The Web is the biggest, the fastest, the most addictive thing ever. The Web will revolutionize this, supplant that. The Web will set you up on the best date you ever had and the sex will be out of this world. Just now, as we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the day the letters “WWW” hit the big time — Netscape went public on NASDAQ on Aug. 9, 1995 — the superlatives are flying particularly fast. In the August issue of Wired, founding editor Kevin Kelly predicts that 3,000 years from now, people will regard the development of the Web as a pivotal moment in human history, as important as the advent of American democracy and the world’s major religions. “This will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet,” he writes.
The article looks at 37signals, a company with several web based products and a framework that has generated much buzz, Ruby on Rails. I haven’t used Basecamp but I do use Backpack and Ta-da List and the interfaces are wonderful – using AJAX and Ruby on Rails of course.
Another site that is using AJAX extensively is http://www.BlinkList.com. For full disclosure, this is our site. I just wrote a blog post with all the major AJAX features that we are using on Blinklist in case you are interested.
http://mindvalley.blogspot.com/2005/08/blinklist-embraces-ajax-in-action.html
BlinkList is also a great place to learn about Ajax
http://www.blinklist.com/tag/ajax/
If you do get a chance to play with it, let us know your thoughts! We are always eager to improve our site and improve our use of AJAX as one of the core frameworks.
Mike