This week: Greasemonkey mayhem, Ajax fever, Web Design Minimalism mojo, Blogpoly Fun!, Yahoo
Music Engine rave.
Greasemonkey gives power to power users
What is Greasemonkey? According to the
homepage, it’s “a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML (“user
scripts”) to any web page to change its behavior.” In laymans terms, it’s a Firefox
add-on that lets users monkey around with any webpage – change its data, design,
or functionality. Greasemonkey gives practical meaning to the term ‘read/write web’, because
it literally enables users to re-write a webpage.
It’s creating a stir in the developer community right now, as evidenced by Mark
Pilgrim‘s latest book: Dive Into
Greasemonkey. That’s for the technical-minded. The best business-oriented
introduction I’ve read on Greasemonkey was by a blogger called Nivi, who thinks Greasemonkey will “blow up business models”. He gives
examples, such as adding competitor pricing to an Amazon page.
For the Web wonks amongst us, this is an interesting quote from Nivi:
“Greasemonkey allows us to connect a page from the deep web to another page on the
deep web. Deep web pages are created dynamically from database queries. So, Greasemonkey
is, in a sense, hypertext for databases.”
Time will tell whether that is true, but it’s a tempting metaphor for Web 2.0…
Ajax Fever
Ajax is another hot technology in the Web 2.0 world, evidenced by the recent Ajax Summit
hosted by O’Reilly and Adaptive Path. Ajax stands
for ‘Asynchronous JavaScript + XML’, but you can get a better idea of what it is by
using Google’s Gmail and Google Maps. Derek Powazek explains:
“Ajax, and the pile of techniques and technologies that get lumped in with it, are all
about breaking that page-by-page web experience into smaller chunks. If the traditional
web was letter writing, Ajax is instant messaging.”
This week Flickr
announced they were converting from Flash to Ajax – further proof that Ajax is a
defining technology of Web 2.0.
Web Design Minimalism
Have you noticed how many weblogs have taken to stripping away all their bells and
whistles and gone all minimalist? The most recent one I’ve noticed is Tom Coates’
excellent blog plasticbag. Jarrod Piccioni has been
following this trend and notes:
“The concept [of minimalism in web design] still applies today, where the focus is
shifting from the adoption and support of web standards to the adoption and spreading of
Web 2.0.”
His point being that the content is the most important element. Jarrod’s post has some
great tips for bloggers who want to ensure their content is the main attraction. Also
check out Noah
Brier’s advice to design for your content, “rather than against it”.
Blogpoly
My Wrap-Up has been a bit techie this week, so for some light relief have a look at Blogpoly – a variation of the game
Monopoly. Not only is it an accurate visual overview of the Web 2.0 world, it’s also a
lot of fun! For example: del.icio.us, Bloglines and Technorati occupy the coveted orange
spots (where I used to try and stack all my hotels – a common strategy for every Monopoly
player back in the day…); Wikipedia and Creative Commons are the two public utilities;
and “Chance” and “community chest” become “comment” and “trackback”.
Techie Post of the Week: Yahoo Music Engine
Lucas Gonze pointed me to a beauty of a post
written by Ian
Rogers, one of the developers of the new Yahoo! Music Engine. OK, it’s a breathless
account of something he helped build, but the sheer enthusiasm in this post made me
forget about the obvious bias. For example this passage:
“We want users. Not only that, we want network users so we can to tie together all the
services we offer. That’s our business. We’re not selling you operating systems or
hardware on the side. Yahoo! Music Engine is a container for network media services.”
You can tell Ian really believes in this product – aren’t blogs great! And oh to have
a job like that, where you love what you do for a living (OK, I’m getting there…slowly).
That’s a wrap for another week!™