AJAX Desktops
OK, so I've not written much lately, but what with working, watching TV, and reading books I just haven't got round to it! :)
Anyway, AJAX is still one of the buzzwords of the moment, and there are a lot of so called AJAX Desktops coming out at the moment, including Microsoft's recent announcement of live.com.
This appears to be their official version of the start.com site that I've mentioned previously, and is in direct competition with the likes of Google, Yahoo, Netvibes (my favourite), ProtoPage, Zoozio etc.
These are all trying to become your browser homepage, and provide options to customize the content that is displayed on them. For now the main feature seems to be adding rss feeds to show the information you want (I'm sure you'll all want to add http://gerardsmyth.blogspot.com/atom.xml :) ) which is pretty neat, but I think its the stuff that Microsoft are calling 'Gadgets' that can make these pages really useful.
I think when these pages start showing email, to do lists, calendars, bookmarks, custom notes etc along with the feeds content they will become really useful Some of these features are already available, with Netvibes being the closest I think, but Microsoft making the live.com API available will really increase the number of gadgets available for it I reckon!
There's still gonna be a few issues to sort out though.
Firstly screen space. When you start adding a few components to any of these pages, you quickly run out of space. I think they are gonna need to implement some kind of 'page' system at some point.
Another issue is you never get the history of your feeds. When you load it up you get the first 5 or so posts in each feed, but anything older than this is not available. So if you don't log on for a day you could be missing a lot of important information and not even know it!
So I think there is still lots that can be done to improve these services, but their development is happening very quickly, and it sure is gonna be interesting to see what comes next!
Anyway, AJAX is still one of the buzzwords of the moment, and there are a lot of so called AJAX Desktops coming out at the moment, including Microsoft's recent announcement of live.com.
This appears to be their official version of the start.com site that I've mentioned previously, and is in direct competition with the likes of Google, Yahoo, Netvibes (my favourite), ProtoPage, Zoozio etc.
These are all trying to become your browser homepage, and provide options to customize the content that is displayed on them. For now the main feature seems to be adding rss feeds to show the information you want (I'm sure you'll all want to add http://gerardsmyth.blogspot.com/atom.xml :) ) which is pretty neat, but I think its the stuff that Microsoft are calling 'Gadgets' that can make these pages really useful.
I think when these pages start showing email, to do lists, calendars, bookmarks, custom notes etc along with the feeds content they will become really useful Some of these features are already available, with Netvibes being the closest I think, but Microsoft making the live.com API available will really increase the number of gadgets available for it I reckon!
There's still gonna be a few issues to sort out though.
Firstly screen space. When you start adding a few components to any of these pages, you quickly run out of space. I think they are gonna need to implement some kind of 'page' system at some point.
Another issue is you never get the history of your feeds. When you load it up you get the first 5 or so posts in each feed, but anything older than this is not available. So if you don't log on for a day you could be missing a lot of important information and not even know it!
So I think there is still lots that can be done to improve these services, but their development is happening very quickly, and it sure is gonna be interesting to see what comes next!
posted by Gezz at
10:21 pm
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