I was thinking about what a nasty little web (pun intended) of connections I've created recently with all the social media sites. For fun, I spent a few minutes diagramming the connections last night. The hardest part was laying out all of the lines and bubbles to make sense of the connections.

One thing that I considered after the fact was how I work with the tools. For example, I find it kind of amazing (even being a technology professional) that I can be anywhere in the world with cell phone coverage, and send a text message that gets propagated across several sites in one shot. The text message goes to twitter, which then gets pulled into FriendFeed and Plaxo. From FriendFeed, the message is then forwarded as my status to LinkedIn and Facebook. My website also shows that message via a FriendFeed gadget.

The interconnections in the web definitely represent something more powerful than what is accomplished with just one site. This is where the real power of the web is these days.

Update: Jon Udell has an interesting post about a similar concept. While I just marveled at the current state of affairs, John describes some goals that he wants to see fulfilled.

Labels: personal, social media, web 2.0

...but then again, I couldn't have topped Microsoft anyway.

I've joined Microsoft's Tech Preview of Live Mesh, and although it's very early in the product's life cycle, I'm already getting value from the tool. One of the ideas that a friend and I bantered around last summer was to solve the problem that file synchronization solutions like Groove have in dealing with devices being off line. We wanted to create a synchronization service that would handle the files "in the cloud". The only difference was that we wanted to only store files until they either expired or were pulled down to the devices that were not connected at the time of the original upload. We were being pessimistic about our ability to manage the sale of storage required to support a fully accessible file store for the web.

Regardless of the argument about Microsoft's intentions (does the Mesh support the "cloud" model, or defend against it), they are going to have a hit. To me, the "cloud" model has it's limitations and the local desktop / OS has other problems. Merging the two is what will get people into the cloud way of thinking.

Labels: cloud computing, live mesh, microsoft, web 2.0

There's a working group that just started up called the Thin Server Architecture Working Group (ok, it's just three folks that are getting together to discuss things, but it's a start). It looks like it's going to be a higher level discussion than related W3C activities (which are more focused on standards discussions). InfoQ has a good one page summary of what's out there for the working group today (which isn't much).

Here's my issue though... my current role is all about the delivery of a Rich Internet Application (RIA), and I have some fundamental issues with the standards and implementations today:

Storage of the "View" - The Thin Server Architecture Working Group is all about the idea of pushing the interface logic to the client. That's very good... but something needs to provide that logic to the client (hint: the server). They need to be sure to consider that part of the architectural models in their work.

Current Client Rendering Performance - HTML clients have some serious performance limitations today. DOM manipulation seems to have been considered a secondary performance goal until recently. Flash and Silverlight are certainly able to handle the visual aspects of the presentation effeciently, and they both offer opportunities for fairly effecient display logic to be imbedded, but I'd like to see the browsers step up their DOM handling efforts.

Developer Optimization - I know that many, many developers and architects look at the MVC model as being superior to the "everything in one block of code" model (I made that one up, but you know what I mean). That's absolutely true, but one belefit of the "everything in one block of code" model is initial development (not maintenance development) can be performed as a stream of thought. Because of this, many younger or less experienced developers will start to learn some very bad habits as soon as they start coding for the web. Tools for RIA development need to help with the seperation of logic layers (not necessarily the MVC model), and at the same time feel natural to code.

Standards and working groups are very important, but the most important part of any architecture, specification or design pattern is how they get implemented in the real world.

Labels: ajax, design patterns, process, web 2.0