Just like how GNOME developers are only good at serving themselves, development communities and hackers, so do web application developers only make solutions that serve the group of people that act like little crying babies whenever there’s no Internet connection. (well, not really. Both serve other groups too. Of course.)
Truth is, and I’ll take any of those Web fan babies on a trip to reality in any city at any time for at least the next 15 years, that the vast majority of people during the vast majority of their time don’t have something that you could call an Internet connection.
Surprisingly those people also often have sex in the evening. Meanwhile the people crying for Internet connections usually don’t.
Choosing between real sex and an Internet connection is an interesting question for me, being a workaholic software developer. But in the end, my Tinne’s charms always wins the fight against my computer’s shiny Internet connection. Seriously.
I mean that listening music in my car using Last.fm is not an option. Consider this: With good music in my car and my girlfriend sitting next to me, I’m far more likely to please her than I would be in case I’d frustrate her with this “Buffering…” and “Connection lost” crap that would inevitably be the result of a Last.fm player in my car.
Guess what will get us at a cocktail bar leaving us with the right atmosphere? A car with a Last.fm player, or a car with a USB stick? (usually we use bicycles, because we are responsible young drivers, but anyway). A car that 90% of the times has this “Buffering…” thing would make her laugh about her funny nerdy boy the first time. But after ten times, I’m pretty sure my investment in her cocktails will be ruined by that piece of shit music player, in my car.
People who are not into computers don’t even get that first time for free from their female partners. A piece of shit music player is an instant failure. Meaning: they won’t buy it. That’s why you are not seeing Last.fm players for cars.
I mean that using Google Maps for car and truck driving navigation is only something the kind of architect that you want to ban from your software development company would propose. You need to focus on the road while driving. Please don’t focus on the millions of irrelevant accessibility and usability problems a web application like Google Maps introduces.
On top of that, there’s no way all of the highways and cities in Belgium would have reliable Wifi coverage for at least another decade. And Belgium is a wealthy Western country.
We ‘rich boys’ are not the only ones with cellphones. We are probably the only ones with super Internet backbones sticking in our arse, though.
I mean, without any of that Web 2.0 stuff are car GPS devices working just fine the way they work today.
Seriously … to say that all the future of computing belongs to the web, while neglecting the real problems mobile solutions are solving today already, is something only the worst kinds of wannabe architects and morons would say. In my opinion.
You really think I would accept that I can only listen to music with your iLast.fmPod device in the most crowded places of planet earth? Places like inner New York City are probably the only ones where, if you are extremely lucky, you could have a Wifi Internet connection. Even with that connection, Last.fm would still take minutes of buffering per song.
That’s why iPod is a success, and your iLast.fmPod wont be. Well, that’s not the only reason. The other reason is that people buy iPods for the same reasons why grown up people buy swimming pools: to make other people jealous.
Usually, they don’t download a free desktop for the same reason as why they invest in swimming pools. They download it because it’s the only way to make the piece of shit computer perform the things that help them achieve their personal goals.
The point that I’m trying to make is: most Web 2.0 applications suck. They solve one problem (deployment) and they introduce fifty clearly identifiable new ones. On top of that, they are not ‘free’ as in free beer either, right?!
They are the monopolist’s best friends! Microsoft’s monopoly will look like a baby compared to Google’s in a few years.
But don’t confront the Web 2.0 fan babies with those ‘problems’! They’ll just go “la la la”, “not listening”, “Youtube rocks”, “la la la”.
That’s fine, but then go out of the way for the people who will solve the real problems in the next decade.
Web apps work and will work where they work. They might even work great, sometimes. But they wont where they wont.
One word: “Agree”.
Web applications do suck. Someone[tm] should fork Web 0.9. I’ve been saying that for a while. :-o Must be a Philip thing. ;-)
We could just continue making mobile softwares that solve the problem.
In parallel can those web 2.something guys continue trying very hard to solve problems that require a economic model (a free yet reliable wireless Internet connection on the entire planet) that is not solvable for at least a few more generations.
I seriously wonder how any company is going to set this model up. Although once this would be set up, that company would probably be the world’s most powerful entity in the world (having control over ALL people’s Internet traffic in a world where a majority of typical problems are solved by computing devices. Wow).
However interesting that would be, it would introduce political problems too.
And however interesting that would be, the technical challenge and the energy/power required to achieve this (with today’s wireless standards) would probably require a few thousand nuclear power plants, millions of wifi access points and thousands of people being paid almost nothing for maintaining all those devices constantly.
I just don’t think it’s “doable”, given the speed of wifi innovations that I have seen for the last five years, within three or four generations.
Which basically means that I better don’t care about it too much: I will be death before THAT solution is in place.
And most current powerful and ultra rich people who are alive today and who could make this happen, would be death too. So there’s no profits for them personally.
Reality … is an interesting thing, sometimes, dear Web 2.0 fan babies.
Maybe people called Philip have an extra sense for reality, and is that the thing, Philip? :-)
Indeed. I would like to also point out that the technology base they are attempting to use is simply not fit. Javascript was really never designed for Ajax from ground to top and it really shows.
Before those Web 2.0 fanbois can show me 10-50x performance boost, and build their OMGWTFBBQ applications without breaking basic functionality like browser back button, they can sod off.
Furthermore I see daily cases where some plain retard web “developer” substituted stuff like tag with 100 lines of javascript. It makes me want to find out the address of the person who made it and pay him a visit… There are good spots for using all that fancy new stuff, but most of the fanbois don’t realize that it should be used extremely reluctantly.
Baaa! The blog software ate my beautiful html IMG tag.
So, when you want to share the last weekend pictures with your gf you probably pass it over the USB stick too right? Or do you use flickr, picasa or upload the pics to your personal web gallery?
Web x.x applications are not only useful when you have a wireless internet connection. In a vast majority they are useful for people with ANY kind of internet connection at speeds of at least 56 Kbps.
Yeah, that’s pretty low right? Well, I live in a, hmmm how they say… third world country?… and in this country the personal computer penetration is around 2.6% of the total population, and the internet penetration is around 2.0%.
So about 75% of people in this country with a personal computer has some kind of internet access at no less than 56Kbps speed. And guess what, most people don’t even know what IMAP, POP or even Outlook are but they use hotmail/yahoo/gmail. People use services like msn live spaces, flickr, or picasa to share photos. And surprisingly enough this is the number 1 country in facebook usage in latin america.
Sure, wireless connections are very scarse. This is not japan, but who needs to play last.fm in their car when you can put all the music you want on an mp3 cd or your mp3 player? And google maps? who need maps in a country where their city’s streets are not mapped to gps and almost no one has a car with gps either.
Nevertheless, I use Last.fm at home all the time with no buffering or connection issues, watch youtube videos to procrastinate, and browse through google maps or google earth just for fun :-D
So, is the future of web apps bound the state of wireless networks? Completely not.
Should I be called a web fan baby? I don’t think so, since I recognize de value of stand alone applications where they beat web based ones. For example I think there is a long long road ahead for google docs to beat microsoft office at least in usage statistics.
Should you be called a standalone fan baby? Well, I’m pretty sure of that ;-)
@passenger: woah! 56k modem-like connections are extremely fast compared to my sometimes-one-second-per-packet latency GPRS connection that is currently costing me a few EUROs per megabyte, since I’m roaming.
Tbf not ‘currently’, because I’m back at my hotel. You see, I wanted to reply you while I was on a boat that was floating on the Bosphorus in Istanbul. Problem was that my connection was constantly failing.
Therefore I waited until I was back at my hotel where I have a wifi router that has ~5% quality in my room. You can probably imagine the ridiculous amounts of connection failures and latency that I’m having.
So yes, I’m going to share my photos with Tinne using a USB stick, or maybe I will send them to her when I’m back in Belgium (where I have a Internet backbone sticked in my arse).
You see, perhaps some people do but I don’t want to waste my tourism-time on waiting for flaky connections. Nor do I want to pay more than the price of 80 cocktails for GPRS AND wait for flaky connections to send,for example, photos to Flickr.
So your example, of photosharing, is currently completely failing for me. Yet I have plenty of money to buy myself really expensive, shiny camera’s, Internet connections, USB sticks.
I think if I would send a USB stick by postal mail to Tinne, that the photos would arrive sooner than if I’d try any of the Internet options that I have here. I actually seriously think that that would be a better option, indeed. No really.
So basically … all Web 2.0 use-cases are failing for me. Right here, right now.
You must know that I’m an expert computer software developer, who earns a living in Europe with it. You can assume that I ought to know how to get on the Internet. That I’m one of those people who ‘know’ about all this modern stuff. So it’s not that I’m a moron why I don’t have these options.
It’s really that they are simply not available. And Istanbul has relatively good Internet access.
You tell me how non-computer experts who are in my situation (a tourist in a big city) are going to seriously consume a web 2.0 application. And I mean “seriously”. Not the “once this week at the hotel” – answer, please. That doesn’t count and that’s just for checking E-mail (if even that worked out for this normal person).
I don’t see it. I really don’t.
SO. Web 2.0: fail, fail, fail and fail.
But that one mobile device that I carry around all the times, my cellphone, wow .. I have used that one often successfully here in Istanbul.
SO, mobile: success, success and success
Not that I’m completely sold on “weblications” personally, but I think you’re only really considering your own use case here. Internet applications hardly require a free wireless infrastructure to be attractive; their popularity without one would seem to make that obvious.
The average user doesn’t necessarily care about wireless access. Not having to install anything is a big benefit for some users. Casual access from other wired sites is another – checking mail from work or a friend’s house for example. And of course some applications are naturals for the medium – photo galleries, for example, where sharing with family and friends is a fairly ubiquitous desire.
I think you underestimate the availability of network access in some areas as well, and erroneously think it needs to be free. Data access from wireless phone carriers is becoming a common bundle, and browsers on phones are becoming increasingly capable (expect the iPhone to spur other manufacturers to focus on this area).
You also mention latency on GPRS, which is certainly painful, but basing the viability of wireless applications on a dated network standard is fatuous. Deployments of 3G networks are well under way in a lot of countries. I’ve been enjoying an EV-DO connection with latency typically in the 150-200ms range for years, with very few coverage problems in any of the areas I typically travel. And more complex applications are getting increasingly smart about latency masking techniques (including full off-line operation in some cases).
Even relying on wi-fi is hardly infeasible in a lot of cases. I see very few hotels or even cheap motels which don’t offer wireless internet access here in the United States and an increasing number of popular chains are offering wireless access. I can think of at least three within walking distance of my house.
Relying on internet access for music might not work for everyone (and I’d hardly recommend it as the only option) but that’s actually how I access my music most of the time – simple little ruby script on my server that transcodes flac to ogg overe http.
I’ve also speculated whether the wireless carriers here – Verizon in particular – might enter into competition with terrestrial and satelite radio providers. They already have a solid data infrastructure and they already provide media streaming to phones. To top it off GM is planning on putting their OnStar service – which includes an EV-DO radio – into every car starting in 2010.