Just a couple of things that don’t really warrant entries, but I wanted to comment on.
Ajax: The term, derived I believe from Asynchronous Javascript and XML, has been under fire in some quarters because it describes existing – sometimes for years – technologies. My reply? Who cares? If it succinctly describes a group of technologies well enough to be useful in conversation, I don’t care who coined it (Adaptive Path, in this case) or how long the component technologies have been around. I’m as against useless acronymns as the next guy – despite the fact that I’m an analyst – but I was getting tired of writing DHTML, XMLHTTPRequest, etc over and over again.
MSFT & Ajax: Continuing on the Ajax theme, Scoble kicked off a lengthy debate on whether Outlook Web Access (OWA) should be considered an Ajax pioneer. And actually, I’m fine with it being described thus – it is a very nice piece of work (although Scalix’s implementation is very comparable). But he went further and claimed that OWA was “one of the best uses of AJAX technology in the industry.” At which point he got hammered in the comments given that OWA, as I’ve commented before, is IE only. Then Dare Obasanjo jumped in claiming – with some justification – that the arguments were on some level born of a Pro-Google/Anti-Microsoft bias. True as that may be, I don’t see it as relevant in this case. Gmail offers full functionality over a variety of browsers, while OWA renders poorly (I know, I have to use it at home) in non-IE browsers. For that reason alone OWA cannot be considered “the best.”
Gmail: Speaking of Gmail, it seems like everyone’s favorite cross-platform Ajax webmail product has been having some scalability issues recently. Yesterday I was getting a Javascript error when I tried accessing it for a few hours. Nothing earth-shattering there, just an interesting datapoint.
F-Spot and Flickr: On a totally unrelated note, thanks to Erik Dasque for informing me that the latest and greatest F-Spot – a photo management application written for Mono – supports Flickr export. After installing 0.0.12, I’ll hopefully have my local photos more synced with Flickr then before. And that’s a good thing.
Flickr: Speaking of Flickr, it’s a bit after the fact but I wanted to say congrats to Caterina, Stewart, Cal and the rest of the Flickr gang for their Yahoo deal. I’m using Flickr at an accelerating rate (any pictures you see in this space are posted from Flickr’s post-to-MT interface), and hope that the Yahoo keeps its hands off the service which is remarkable while lending its knowledge re: scaling. Could be great, and either way I’m glad to see these guys rewarded. Between Flickr and Zawodny, I’m going to have to start paying more attention to Yahoo again.
