Back to the Future
I am thinking about or analysing 2 or 3 web applications. Any time I want to hit the road with one or the other there is something that stops me. Sometimes are silly things, human limits etc. Sometimes I think the immensity of the web imposes me. How can you create something that is (you think) unique and usefull?
I was recently reading some articles about the future of programming (The history of physics and the future of computing). I don’t know if I understood everything, but the idea of “bind rather than select” it just fits in when you work on the web.
It makes more sense to just discover things on the web when you are using a service or application, rather than having to specify or select something explicitly. How on earth should I know if I prefer this or that online photo album for storing my pictures? Or why should I “enroll” my site to a search engine list? Aren’t they suppose to search for it?
These all are big questions and I feel I’m missing something when a web service I use doesn’t “discover” stuff for me. I’m not talking about spam, newsletters etc. Think about those long tail right-side offerings you see when you look at a book or CD online review. It’s just normal to get those related artists or writings showe dto you. How could I discover them by myself?
A good idea (that I have on my todo list for every web project) might be to use microformats or something similar. That way, a discovery service could understand why are you linking to something, automatically. But this involves work for the programmer and for the user.
Getting back to the article that started this post, it would be really usefull to have these discovery or binding capabilities right into our web framework, whether is Rails or Delphi or PHP, whatever. Perhaps dynamic languages (like Ruby or python) are more prepared, but the others have the experience on their site. Let’s wait and see …
