Rik Abel: It's a whole new internet!

Janice Fraser at Adaptive Path neatly sums up the feeling of excitement in the web development community of late in her essay It's a Whole New Internet. After the dot-com boom and bomb we are starting to see green shoots emerge, in the form of innovative and actually *useful* web site and web applications, many of them from the independent developer community - del.icio.us, flickr, wikipedia, basecamp, ta-da lists - but also from the unstoppable innovation machine that is google - gmail, google maps, google local, google suggest etc. And then we have the wonderful innovations which occur when independent developers are let loose on google's API - combine google maps with craigslist property listings and you have this beautiful piece of genius from Paul Rademacher.

Those who stuck with this whole web lark after the bomb, because they truly loved the web and could see it's real potential are starting to build the internet 2.0. They are doing this largely through building innovative applications to fulfil their own needs, rather than with a view to some mythical IPO. Which is nice. The recent emergence blinking into the spotlight of technologies such as xmlhttprequest (a.k.a. AJAX, which has actually been around for a couple of years) are allowing richer interactions on the client-side and will change the rulebook for us 'interaction designers' working the web. In many ways, design for web applications will come to more closely resemble traditional design for desktop application, with support for previously impossible tasks such as drag-and-drop, instant form validation, etc.

In fact, many übergeek web-folks (such as Evan Williams, CEO of ODEO) are more or less running their company on web apps. This, of course, rocks. You can pretty much work where you like (which if you have a wireless laptop is lots of places and more all the time), you have a web-based remote backup of all your project files (if you upload regularly, at least) and in a pinch you may not even need to use your own machine to get some work done. (Of course, some apps such as Photoshop and Flash will not be migrating to the web any time soon...)

Anyway, exciting times indeed to be a web designer - I'd better read a few books on XML. And maybe some Alan Cooper.