Whale's V!

Discovered by the Germans in 1904, they named it San Diego, which of course in German means a whale's vagina.

So I'm San Diego, day one, of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference, which is the tutorials. The all day Flickr tutorial is all sold out. I'm now sitting in the front row listening to a tutorial of next-gen web apps. The speakers formed the company of Adaptive Path, who are people interested in doing user experience work.

One guy has already joined Google because they acquired a software product from Adaptive Path.

The first slide is a big one, saying "Web 2.0", and they wish to define what that's all about.

They started off with a history of boom and bust, talking about the Dutch tulip mania from several hundred years ago, where tulips were coming from northern Africa (?), and due to a virus, the tulips were producing fantastic colors, and people were giving up a month's worth of salary to get those tulips.

The tutorial wants to discuss what "Web 2.0" is all about.

The initial part is the elements of web style. Key to this is understanding the web as hypertext vs. the web as a software application. Expectations differ depending on which way you view the web. (This information is on http://jjg.net/elements.

The evolution of use is having the user control more of their data. The user can make decisions on how they want to see the data. This is an issue of building trust with users. The initial level is the surface attractiveness. Thus, how a website looks can do a lot for a website, even if anything below is horrible.

What is AJax really? The guy who coined the term, Jesse James Garrett, talks about what is Ajax. He says it's asynchronous interaction within a browser, and that's it. It doesn't have to be Javascript, or whatever. However, what Javascript provides is a split between client and server. The client interaction doesn't have to be synchronous with the server. Garrett uses the phrase "roller skates on the Web", which was what Bruce Sterling said when he read the article on Ajax.

Garrett says that Web 2.0 is really about better interactions, not better technologies. One of the keys of AJAX is technical, which is to incrementally migrate to this technology. Another key is the ability to read each other's source.

The technology for AJAX has been around a while, but why is it popular now? Some of that has to do with browser manufacturers have stopped adding features, and have fixed features that were buggy to begin with. Better Javascript support, for example.

Now interaction design involves discoverability. For example, adding suggestions as you type in a city for a planned flight. But that can be overwhelming too. Users may not catch on to suggestions.

What features do these new web applications have to have to that users can get a richer experience? Findability and discoverability is one of those issues.

Another issue is the ability to recover from errors. Users are scared about clicking a link, because they feel like they are going to purchase something they don't want. Can interactions be changed to placate the user? AJAX can be used to improve the intercation without losing their place.

Tagging is another way to let relationships be drawn by users in a community, rather than being imposed by a designer.

The location for the rest of Jeff's talk is: Etech PDF.