Have You Heard?!
Have you heard about it? The new app? It's fantastic! It does podcasting, podcatching, and feed reading. It uses Atom, microformats, HTML, XML, jQuery, and Prototype... it even uses Ruby on Rails! It's got blogging and wikis built in, it can handle email, and it's SMS compatible. There's a mobile version. Its a social network, unique in that it appeals to just about everybody...
It's called THE WEB, people.
Seriously! I note that with increasing frequency, web developers seem to be desperately including every feature they can conceive of, and some they (apparently) can't. What happened to the *nix philosophy? Do one thing and do it well, right? Connect all the shiny bits with a series of tubes and let amazing things happen?
To most people, your amazing Web 3.0rc2 app isn't an application at all. It's just one tiny component of the amazing desktop app with the blue "e" icon (if you have especially intelligent users, it's a fox + globe icon, but my point holds). You can't fool all the people all the time, and eventually your users will realize that this amazing app includes better versions of your "wall" and "status update" and "message center," just a click away.
I think it's high time that us developers to learn to say no! No, we won't create yet another social network that sends you emails with message notifications instead of messages (argh!). No, we won't build a feedreader into the release notes wiki! No more slickly vidcast development frameworks that build a slower version of anything that's already been done in just 20 minutes (application design and server configuration time omitted for brevity).
Please oh please oh please. Just write an app - a small app - that adds a nice, solid feature to the web, instead of trying to add all the web's features in your app.
Tags: unix webapp facebook web rant web3_0 blog wiki april 16th 2008