the Onda

Good piece in a well-named InfoWorld blog, "Fatal Exception," on how all of this emphasis on richer UIs for web applications may be unwittingly forcing the web away from what made it great in the first place. Maybe it is the fact that I've been reading Zittrain's book this weekend about how our taste for glossy devices/experiences is causing us to unkonwingly eff up the generative (open) nature of the Internet (ironically, I am reading the book on my very closed Amazon Kindle), but with all of the Silverlight/Flex/GWT stuff landing inside our browsers these days, I tend to agree. Basta to the ever increasing richness of client applications inside the web browser.

Here is an example: there is a new web application called Flowgram that everyone keeps pointing to as the next twist on screencasting. Through a combination of Flash and URL refreshing, you can be taken on a tour of a set of "live" web pages that are clickable and whose embedded objects can be interacted with. Seems pretty cool right?

No, actually it is kind of annoying. Sometimes you just want to dive into the content at your own speed, in your own way and yet, from what I've seen of this seems all but impossible in Flowgram. Despite the fact that there is a timeline scubber thing you can use to jump around, the refreshes are far too slow— far slower than it would be to just load the underlying sites. For instance, I have been looking forward to seeing/watching/reading a presentation on Facebook's photo-related infrastructure, but because I've only found it on Flowgram, I've abandoned it twice, probably never to return again.

The web is great because it is so lightweight— let's try to make sure we don't throw that particular baby out with the bath water.

Tomorrow: why photo sharing sites still suck (including the one we built).

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