September 18, 2006 Archives

I'm impressed, but maybe I'm easily impressed. In fact, I've been out of the loop as to new web products. The latest big thing I encountered was Flickr. Flickr and its extensive use of AJAX - just the in situ edition of photo titles/descriptions is woaw-inducing. Like, seriously, how could you *not* have thought of that before? It's not even so complicated to make work, but I suppose it would be a little harder to optimize it. The problem with this sort of application (at least the problem I bog myself with) is how do you handle large scale deployments, so to make best use of bandwidth and that sort of thing? I am indeed one of those people who would do anything to strip down the code as much as possible to try and save on bandwidth costs.

MySpace, I don't know (but I do), is the summum of bad taste, the nightmare of a standards-conscious web developer. And the worst of it is that it dates of 2005, and people will keep using it, b/c they don't know better - or they don't realize that there could be better. People like my brother, who's not dumb at all (<3), who's using a clone of LJ (GJ), b/c it does what he needs his journal to do: be able to save pics and share them with his friends. And he's likely to stay there, bicauze all of his friends are also on GJ. It's mind-boggling that the success of MySpace does not reside in the raw quality of the product, but rather on *who* uses the product. In fact, not so mind-boggling when you consider that celebrities, people associated with the brand, has always made the success of a product.