A step closer to Utopia - Offline AJAX

This week, among head line news of "Surface computing" and YouTube video support by Apple iTV, there was one other news which made headline - Google announced the "offline" add-on for all browsers to better support "Offline AJAX". Google will use SQLLITE and lightweight local web server to support this feature.

In last two years we saw a huge trend towards Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, this was viewed with skepticism by many industry pundits. Microsoft and other OS vendors launched Software + Service (S+S) model to combat the online applications threat. The argument was that installed softwaer can provide value-added services to the online application experience and I think this argument is valid at least for the near forcible future. The biggest drawback of SaaS model was its lack of offline support. What happens when you lost connectivity. Agreed, by 2050, Internet connection will be everywhere, just like air, but today, it is a real issue for most of us.

Is Google Gear going to solve all the problems? Well not, first of all it's a add-in, which means it will be installed and baptised in the geek community for a while before it reaches to grandma's computer. It will only reach to Grandma's computer when all browser ship offline capability as standard feature out of the box.

Giving credits where its due, there were some other projects before Google to try the offline Ajax experience - some at Mozilla and others at some of the popular web 2.0 companies. But the fact that 800 pounds gorilla (aka Google) jumped into this bandwagon, will certainly give a big push to this initiatives. Google is also donating most of their offline code to Mozilla experience.

Only time will tell which company will succeed in this effort but on a macro level - it is going to be for the betterment for all of us. Ubiquitous computing is nearer than we think.

Usability!! who cares !

When the whole world pretty much agreed to use " *" in front of a label to denote a required field, the site below decided to use "*" for all "optional" fields. Why???

AJAX. JavaScript and SEO = Not a great mix!

Having developed my own AJAX framework, I thought AJAX is the next best thing happened to the world after a slice of bread. So I was suprised today, when one my best friend who is in web marketing told me that he hates AJAX!!! My first reaction was that he does not understand the technology. May be he is confusing AJAX with a dish washing detergent or Portable Potty :) . But since he is web marketing, this can't be true. So I asked him why does he hates AJAX

Well , it turns out that search crawlers do not understand JavaScript well. Most bots such as Google, Yahoo or MSN, either simply ignore JavaScript as a code and NOT content. Well, if you are in a business of Search Engine Optimization, I can see why would you hate the AJAX . With a Pure AJAX application, you dont have the traditional HTML page, Rather you send the Data either in XML or JSON format to the browser, where your JavaScript takes care of

That explains why major online stores such as Amazon, Ebay or Walmart sites are NOT completely AJAX. They live and die by the quality of their Search Engine Optimization. How often do you search for a Amazon product from google ? Come on, admit it, all of us do that. We treat google as super genie who can do everything for us.

So what is the best approach, I think those who are building a web application, where SEO is important, they need to take a hybrid approach. You need have all content pages, so BOTS can index the content, but once the user is on your site, you can provide a richer UI experience with AJAX

What is your experience ? Share with me .

BTW my site is AJAX enabled, but I do have static HTML pages so the index bots can index my pages and send some traffic my way !


Thanks

Hans Rosling at Zeitgeist Europe 2007

Stumble upon this very interesting video by Prof - Hans Rosling from Sweden on YouTube. He is professor of International health in one of the prestigious university in Sweden.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uabWkN2THc8&mode=user&search=

He is speaking at Google Zeitgesit Europe 07. He together with his son and daughter-in-law they developed a very interesting software called "GapFinder" and later sold it to google. I am not sure how true it is but the picture he is presenting about the economic gap in different countries is very interesting. To me, its a very rosy picture of the world, specially the statistics we read and learn. Being a economic student, Its very fascinating. I wish I had access to such information or software when I was studying. Sometime, I feel like I should go back to school and re-do my degree all over again. Wouldnt it be fun.?