This months .Net Magazine had an interesting article by Derek Powasek entitiled Keep Your Web 2.0 Community Happy.

Running a web community can be fun and rewarding, but you’re always reliant on the good faith of your members. So what happens when rogue elements threaten to disrupt, even destroy, the foundations of your society, often behind the cloak of anonymity? How do you rest back control from the ’supervillains’?

Powasek’s article elaborates on 5 scenarios to keep the community happy. These relate to various defence mechanisms that he has employed on websites like kvetch.com and are summarised below.

The eyeball defence

People behave better when they think someone’s watch their every move. It is human nature that people become more trustworthy when they are being watched. Whether it is a ‘pay for what you think it’s worth’ type service, or a web community, people become more honest if there is a modicum of Big Brother about the website.

The probation defence

Block ‘angry’ users from posting content for a period of time. Once that period has expired, allow the user to again fully interact with the website.

The community boot defence

Give members the ability to report the bad members. Members can flag bad content or people. After a certain number of flags, the content can be programmatically removed or the person banned for a short period of time.

The denial of existence defence

Since deleting a troublesome user’s account will just prompt them to sign up with a new username, write a tool that degredates the performace of the site for those members who are causing the problems. You could even go as far as show a version of the Twitter Fail Whale. Websites are known to break, so it won’t be out of the ordinary for a person to experience a badly performing website. It just happens that that person is a nuisance.

The dig your own hole defence

Deleting a person account is sometimes the only answer. Therefore, giving the user the ability to delete their own account and optionally take all their generated content with them will provide a release mechanism. Always provide a friendly fairwell message: We’re sorry to see you go. You’re welcome back any time.

Buy .Net magazine to read the full article.

For many web developers, whenever JavaScript is mentioned it provokes a rye smile; JavaScript is one of those programming languages that is rather avoided than embraced. This is not the fault of the language itself, but rather the browsers. A few years ago, the landscape of client-side scripting was a bleak scene. Browser inconsistencies, particularly with the dominant Internet Explorer, implementation bugs and numerous target platforms made developing client-side JavaScript a tricky undertaking.

To the consternation of these same developers, the landscape changed and Web 2.0 hit the mainstream. Almost overnight, every website on the internet wanted to use or was using AJAX. Marketers joined the bandwaggon and every feature requested had to involve something dynamic and revolutionary. Thus JavaScript development quickly hit the forefront of peoples minds and became as important as any server-side technology available at the time.

Over the next few blog posts, I will be using the popular frameworks jQuery, Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI), ExtJS and Adobe’s Spry with ColdFusion to demonstrate various techniques, such as autocomplete and form validation.

You’re a YouTube addict with a serious amount of uncut video footage that you want to upload. If you want to transform that footage into an Oscar winning video clip that will be viewed millions of times, you’ll need to do a little editing. But buying editing tools isn’t a cheap pasttime. However, all is not lost. Ever since the social video market boomed back in 2006, a number of online video services have matured and sought to differentiate themselves by adding editors.

If you’re already working with video on the web, an online editor is fast, easy and free. In theory, these services could bring video editing to people who would otherwise never engage in it. People already engaging in video editing can benefit from automatic software updates and the sharing made possible by online communities.

Here’s a brief look at some of the services out there in the ether.

JumpCut

Jumpcut, acquired by Yahoo in 2006, lets you upload video, photos, and audio, or import from Flickr or Facebook, and edit using a Flash interface. Jumpcut is the most developed of the editors, allowing you to add a long list of effects, transitions, and captions to the videos. It also incorporates fine grained control of trimming and audio levels (uploaded background audio and voice). The complexity of the interface makes it great for detailed edits and mashups, but borders on being too heavy an application for the internet.

Checkout the Jumpcut website.

Eyespot

Eyespot is a fully featured editor like Jumpcut. It has a drag-and-drop interface that lets you upload video, photos, and audio and then add transitions, effects, titles, and music. The editor isn’t as attractive and easy to use as Jumpcut’s, but Eyespot offers a good deal of free media sets from partners like The Colbert Report, Public Enemy, and Dreamworks Pictures. Eyespot’s white label editor is becoming available on more and more sites, with the NBA being a prime example.

Checkout the Eyespot website.

Cuts

Taking a slightly different tack, Cuts is a great example of a Web 2.0 “mash-up”, where two online applications are merged. In this case a video is taken from YouTube, MySpace or Google and you cut, loop, add preloaded sound effects, and insert captions to enhance the original. Editing is straightforward, consisting of changes to the sound, caption, and navigation levels for the video. Every edit can be re-cut, embedded, and emailed. In the future, Cuts will be expanding into simple editing for digital movies and TV shows.

Checkout the Cuts website.

Motionbox

Motionbox is best known for deep tagging videos, but they also have an editor that is ideal for trimming your Motionbox content and joining the videos together.

Checkout the Motionbox website.

Photobucket

Photobucket leverages the most recent Adobe Flash tools. Unlike other services, users can “mash up” video clips with audio files and photos, and add effects and transitions.

Checkout the Photobucket website.

Social network portability is one of several user-interface ideas and suggestions in the area of data-portability. As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen (and trusted) tools or vendors. When you join a new site, you should be able to import or preferably subscribe to your profile information and your social network from any existing profile of yours. We need a DHCP for Identity. A distributed File System for data. The technologies already exist, we simply need a complete reference design to put the pieces together. This problem is solved by a number existing technologies and initiatives: Microformats, OpenID, OAuth, RDF, RSS, OPML and APML.

Data Portabilities mission is to put all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end Data Portability. To promote that design to the developer, vendor and end-user community.

This post serves a brief primer to each of these technologies.

Microformats

Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviours and usage patterns (e.g. XHTML, blogging).

Examples include:

People and Organizations

hCard

Calendars and Events

hCalendar

Opinions, Ratings and Reviews

VoteLinks, hReview

Social Networks

XFN

Licenses:

rel-license

Tags, Keywords, Categories

rel-tag

Lists and Outlines

XOXO

If you use Flickr, Technorati, Upcoming, Last.fm, Twitter, Cork’d or any number of other services, you can conceivably share data between the different services providers automatically.

More details can be found on the microformats website.

OpenID

OpenID is an open, decentralized framework for user-centric digital identity. OpenID takes advantage of already existing internet technology (URI, HTTP, SSL, Diffie-Hellman) and realizes that people are already creating identities for themselves whether it be at their blog, photostream, profile page, etc. With OpenID you can easily transform one of these existing URIs into an account which can be used at sites which support OpenID logins.

In other words, OpenID allows users to login using shared credentials across different services. It also allows users to decide what information to share between services. For example, you can allow the use of your address on one service, but not another. You can think of OpenID as an extension to the single sign on used by Google or Yahoo! to access their various services.

More details can be found on the OpenID website.

OAuth

The OAuth protocol is less about authentication, which is the realm of OpenID, but rather authorisation. OAuth is an open protocol to allow secure API authorisation in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications. For consumer developers, OAuth is a method to publish and interact with protected data. For Service Provider developers, OAuth gives users access to their data while protecting their account credentials.

A number of services have already been implemented. These include Fire Eagle, Open Social, Pownce, Get Satisfaction and Magnolia.

More details can be found on the OAuth website.

Resource Description Framework (RDF)

RDF is a family of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications originally designed as a metadata model but which has come to be used as a general method of modeling information, through a variety of syntax formats.

The RDF metadata model is based upon the idea of making statements about resources in the form of subject-predicate-object expressions, called triples in RDF terminology. The subject denotes the resource, and the predicate denotes traits or aspects of the resource and expresses a relationship between the subject and the object. For example, one way to represent the notion “The sky has the color blue” in RDF is as the triple: a subject denoting “the sky”, a predicate denoting “has the color”, and an object denoting “blue”. RDF is an abstract model with several serialization formats (i.e. file formats), and so the particular way in which a resource or triple is encoded varies from format to format.

This mechanism for describing resources is a major component in what is proposed by the W3C’s Semantic Web activity: an evolutionary stage of the World Wide Web in which automated software can store, exchange, and use machine-readable information distributed throughout the web, in turn enabling users to deal with the information with greater efficiency and certainty. RDF’s simple data model and ability to model disparate, abstract concepts has also led to its increasing use in knowledge management applications unrelated to Semantic Web activity.

More details can be found on the W3C website.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content including, but not limited to, blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a “feed” or “web feed” or “channel”, contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with web sites in an automated manner that can be piped into special programs or filtered displays.

RSS content can be read using software called an “RSS reader”, “feed reader” or an “aggregator”. The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed’s link into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The reader checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new content, downloading any updates that it finds.

More details can be found on the RSS Board website.

Outline Processor Mark-up Language (OPML)

OPML is an XML format for outlines. Originally developed by Radio UserLand as a native file format for an outliner application, it has since been adopted for other uses, the most common being to exchange lists of web feeds between web feed aggregators.

The OPML specification defines an outline as a hierarchical, ordered list of arbitrary elements. The specification is fairly open which makes it suitable for many types of list data.

More details can be found on the OPML website.

Attention Profiling Mark-up Language (APML)

APML allows you to share your own personal Attention Profile in much the same way that OPML allows the exchange of reading lists between News Readers. The idea is to compress all forms of Attention Data into a portable file format containing a description of your ranked interests.

Services that have adopted APML include Bloglines, Cluztr, Dandelife, Engagd, Idiomag, OpenLink Data Spaces and Particls.

More details can be found on the APML website.

Securely transfering personal data around the web has become an increasingly important concept to not only users of the web, but service providers. Both Plaxo and Six Apart have been working on a system to allow the transferral of data. However, since Google announce Open Social and the Open Social API, the mantle has been handed over and there is now a strong commitment to realising data portability.

In the late 1990s, a large multi-national technology corporation, hoping to become a major force in online advertising, bought a small start-up in a sector that was believed to be the ‘next big thing’. That corporation was Microsoft and the start-up was Hotmail. Hotmail and Microsoft established web-based email as a must-have application for personal use. The addition of Hotmail to the Microsoft inventory promised to increase the companies online revenues that were being dominated by Yahoo!, Google and AOL amongst a host of others.

A decade later it was the turn of a much-evolved AOL to speculate with the purchase of a small and upcoming social networking website, Bebo, for $850m (£425m). This has raised a number of eyebrows since AOL has been a struggling web-portal after its merger with Time Warner, added to the fact that the real value of social networking has yet to be realised or understood.

Both deals in their respective decades offer to the casual observer a paradox of the Internet revolution. Whilst both email and social networking have the premise of being the next big thing which aides revenue generation, it is dangerous to assume that each service can standalone and generate revenue in its own right. Webmail, now over a decade old illustrates this perfectly. Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google and AOL all have their respective webmail services with advertisements stratefically placed to entice the user to click through, but these are a small part of the bigger networks. The offer of email, free archiving, address book and calendar is cheap to deliver, but its primary purpose is to keep the user engaged with the brand and its associated websites, making users more likely to visit the affiliated pages where advertising is more effective.

For instance, I am a fully signed up member of Google and access their email, chat, documents, analytics, webmasters, adsense, adwords, calendar and checkout applications, etc, some of which have advertising and all of which support the core Google search pages through branding. A similar example can also be said of Yahoo!. I again frequently use Yahoo!s MyBlogLog, Flickr and Upcoming services, which serve to re-inforce the Yahoo! brand and web portal.

Social networking will become a ubiquitous feature of online life, but that does not mean it is a business.

From whence came webmail now comes social networking. The implicit values of social networking services such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo have been increased by the big internet and media companies such as News Corporation, with their purchase of MySpace for $580m (£290m) in 2005 and Microsoft’s $260m (£130m) investment for a 1.6% share in Facebook, in late 2007 (valuing it at an enormous $15bn/£7.5bn). But valuing these online services so highly does not mean that there is a valuable revenue model; Facebook’s revenue for 2007 was a mere $150m (£75m). Sergey Brin of Google also admitted that the monetisation of their Orkut service and social networking in general was proving to be problematic (they also have a contractual agreement with News Corporation to offer advertising on their MySpace service).

Facebook has also been met with criticism and difficulty when trying to monetise its service with a project called Beacon. Facebook’s idea was to inform users’ networks whenever an item was purchased therefore creating what is in effect a recommendation system, or algorithmic word-of-mouth. Users rebelled and privacy advocates shouted loudly, the service was axed and Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, was left to apologise for an innovative idea badly implemented.

Whilst social networking does have oportunities to make money, it is unlikely that it will be pots and pots of money. The value of the service, however, is not monetary, but as its genre suggests, it is social. We have already seen how people can connect to past and present friends, but a social networkings strength is in its ability to forge new relationships, business or personal. Social networking has made explicit the connections between people, which has lead to a whole ecosystem of applications built on their APIs which allow users to interact.

But should users really have to visit a specific website to be social?

I often comment that there is something profoundly wrong when people are forced to spend their lives updating their profile to keep in touch with their so-called friends. What happened to the good-old-fashioned telephone? Why don’t people simply arrange to meet up and go for a drink to keep in touch? Of course, with everyone’s increasingly busy lives, it is possible to argue that posting a tweet via twitter, posting an article on a blog or updating your Facebook profile, allows you to continue a real relationship with your friends, whilst not actually needing to see them every Friday or Saturday night. This is a good thing, right?

Another problem presented by today’s social networks is that they are an enclosed ecosystem, at least to users. Whilst Facebook and LinkedIn, in addition to a whole host of others, have provided APIs for developers to encourage them to interact with their services (this has been particularly successful with Facebook) the same cannot be applied to users. The various social networks, until recently, have been reluctant to allow users to pass data between competing services, afterall, this data is core to the success, or indeed failure, of a site. This is understandable since the networks’ huge valuations depend on the sites maximising revenues and page views, so they need to maintain a tight control. As a result, keen Internet users maintain a plethora of online accounts.

2008 will see a change in how people access social networks.

The opening up of social networks, lead by Google with their Open Social API, is set to bring about an evolution in this medium. This change is following the historical standardisation of popular services. First it was email with webmail, which in the early days was restricted to individual ecosystems, for example AOL and CompuServe, then it was instant messaging, with individual services provided by Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, AOL and Skype.

Further developments include the Data Portability Working Group, whose mission is to put all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end data portability. In short, allow users to move their data around competing services. Others are pushing OpenID; a plan to create a single, federated online sign-on system that people can use to access many websites.

The opening of social networks is likely to accelerate thanks to the first tentative, yet bold, steps made by webmail; the first social network. As a technology, webmail has become old fashioned, but its younger sybling, the social network will revitalise not only webmail, but online communication and advertising. Through social intelligence, marketers and advertisers will be able to target adverts for items that we are more likely to want. This will not only boost the users online experience, but provide a more targeted revenue stream.

The fight for social networking dominance has been running for several years now, but it shows no sign of letting up.

On the Web, a walled garden is an environment that controls the user’s access to Web content and services. In effect, the walled garden directs the user’s navigation within particular areas, to allow access to a selection of material, or prevent access to other material.

Recent history suggests that open standards will again better the “walled gardens” of the Web.

In 1994, when the previously obscure computer network, developed by the American Department of Defence, first become known to the general public as the “World Wide Web”, or simply The Web, many people first connected to it via AOL and CompuServe. These subscription-based service providers offered not only access to the Internet, but other services such as email, chatrooms, discussion boards and more. It was access to the Web via the Internet that would lead to the undermining of these services, and the opening up of the Web as a platform for individual and creative expression, revenue generation and social interactivity.

Whilst it took some time for the closed communities to venture out into the wilds of the Web, it brought about the standardisation of the services that made up the early web. For instance, POP and SMTP standardised email and as a result it has become the ubiquitous tool of business. Today, of the early pioneers of the Web, only AOL survives, but as an entirely different entity; a web portal supported by advertising.

History appears to be repeating itself. The biggest online phenomena of the past couple of years, the social-networking websites of Facebook and MySpace, are acting very much like the AOL of the mid-1990s. They are closed systems based upon prioprietory standards. You cannot easily move information from one system or another if you so choose. This ties users into one system, or forces them to create profiles on both. A similar comparison can be drawn with the virtual worlds of Second Life and Entropia Universe.

The Web is better when it’s social.

Part of the reason these websites are popular is because they are closed communities, where users can interact with friends and find new friends with which to interact. This community feel has been tested in recent times, with sites such as Facebook being criticised for using their user’s personal data to target advertising. It is innevitable, however, that these systems are proprietory; it is only once these systems immerge and become popular that standards can be developed and implemented.

Just as the Web’s open standards, embodied in the Netscape browser, displaced the online services providers, so the paradigm of open standards awaits the social networking and virtual worlds. Back in the 1990s it was Netscape, but in the 21st Century it falls to Google to defend the open standards of the Web with the Open Social API. Some say there is a large amount of self interest in this move, since Facebook and MySpace have huge communities, which both networks know a huge amount more about than Google and can hence generate billions of dollars of revenue.

The web is more interesting when you can build applications that easily interact with your friends and colleagues. But with the trend towards more social applications also comes a growing list of site-specific APIs that developers must learn. Open Social is an attempt not only to open up the closed communities and allow developers to interact with the different networks, but allow developers to only learn one API. MySpace has signed up to this initiative and, more reluctantly so has Facebook. A curiosity is AOLs recent aquisition of Bebo, another online community popular in Europe. Is AOL simply jumping on the “band-wagon”? Has it learnt its lessons of the past, or is it using knowledge of its past as a guiding principle? Whatever is the answer, Bebo’s inclusion in Open Social will help it continue its competition with other social networking websites.

I’m not a big fan of the BBC’s recent website redesign! While I believe that a few structural and hierarchical elements could have been addressed better, the overall result of this redesign is too “Facebook” and Web 2.0 for my liking; exactly what an online news site does not need. Who are the BBC trying to appeal to? They have gone from being content centric to design and technology centric. This in itself isn’t a bad thing, but I don’t understand the BBCs motivation for doing so.

Richard Titus, the Acting Head of User Experience at the BBC was a key driver of the project.

From a conceptual point of view, the widgetisation adopted by Facebook, iGoogle and netvibes weighed strongly on our initial thinking.

Titus identifies the key features of the new homepage as being:

• Simple, clean and beautiful, the final design, … visually striking yet unpretentious.
• Personalization: you can choose the content that interests you by adding and removing the content boxes via the “Customise Your Homepage” tab.
• Localization: Users can now set their own location, enabling them to access local sites, weather, news, radio and TV schedules without the hassle often associated with user journeys to local content.
• Simplicity: the customization is intuitive and includes an interactive demo and tips to guide users through the process. It is also unobtrusive – if the user has no desire to customize their page their experience won’t be compromised.
• Search: The site is much easier to read and scan at a glance. At the top of the page there’s a search function (now reduced from two search boxes to one), and at the bottom a full directory of all BBC sites and a link to the A-Z, allowing users to quickly find what they’re looking for.
• Nostalgia: the new homepage also manages to incorporate eccentricity alongside innovation.

Aesthetically bold and bright.

Aesthetically, the new homepage looks nice. It’s big, bold and bright - a far cry from the old days when BBC sites had text almost too small to read and a fixed-width design optimised for tiny monitors. But at the same time it appears far too clunky! I’d prefer something that would look a little more elegant and understated. Something that doesn’t appeal to The Facebook Generation, who are less likely to read the BBC pages at lunchtime, than update their Facebook, Bebo or Twitter profile during that ‘valuable’ hour. This begs the question, does the BBC know who their core audience is?

Confusing interactions.

The homepage makes great use of AJAX, but at the same time, there are a number of confusing interactions going on. For instance, the ‘Edit’ button next to each area of customisable content seems like the wrong label text. I’m not editing the news, the weather or blogs - I’m selecting which news categories I want to see, where I am and which blogs I want to read. These types of button ought to be contextual rather than generic. Edit is simply too vague.

Also, what’s the idea behind those plus and minus buttons for news? Strange idea. Add or remove articles from the displayed list? Why would you want to remove them from view sequentially? If the idea was to allow the user to asynchronously update a short list of available headlines, then why not move back/forwards in blocks of five? Plus and minus are often used as metaphors for creation/deletion in software, so the usage doesn’t seem right.

Personalisation vs Simplicity … an uneasy relationship

The ability to personalise a website is, in general, a good thing. Google has done it with their iGoogle, Yahoo! with My Yahoo and Microsoft with Windows Live. But I think the balance here is gone too far towards design and borrowing from succesful Web 2.0 sites. The BBC website has always been an impressive destination for (relatively) impartial news and current affairs throughout the world, not a Web Portal. Or is this the point? Does the BBC want to become a destination for all your information needs and compete with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo?

The BBC should consider that 14-25 year old users, what I term The Facebook Generation, will require far greater scope for adding their individuality than is currently available. The social networking generation are page-savvy. They want control of their interface to information, their screen is their window on the world and I don’t think that you have gone far enough in divesting control of the display of that information to the user.

But for those who aren’t part of The Facebook Generation, the people who care about getting to the content fast and with little fuss, is the ability to personalise the homepage worthwhile or even simple? I’m not so sure.

Who needs a clock?

Finally, the clock and date. What an important waste of webpage ‘real estate’, even though in the BBC’s case I understand it was a throwback to the old clock that preceded individual TV programmes. If you’ve got a modern computer capable of displaying the clock with the Flash plugin, then you’ll almost certainly have the date and time visible to you anyway. It’s needlessly superfluous on a website.

Both Web 2.0 and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) almost always depend up on the browser as a common denominator. It is with the web browser that web-based applications are accessed and run, yet the browser model is rapidly reaching its limitations.

Adobe thinks it has the answer and so now does Mozilla.

A year ago, most web developers had to think about Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera and perhaps WAP for mobile devices and widget development for one of yet more platforms. Today the horizon is changing and web developers are afforded more opportunity and possibly with that more complexity, through offline development.

Browser extensions now exist that allow for the creation of offline web applications with Dojo Offline, Google Gears, Firefox 3, and other options on the market, pioneering the way and making it possible to take your web application with you on an aeroplane or an underground train.

The drive to make these offline applications desktop applications has also been thrown into the mix, with examples coming from Apple with WebKit Cocoa bindings, Adobe with AIR and Microsoft with Silverlight. Now it is the turn of Mozilla to enter the foray with a project called Prism.

Prism is part of an experiment by Mozilla designed to “bridge the divide in the user experience between web applications and desktop applications“. Essentially, Prism will allow you to create a desktop-like application out of individual websites. These site-specific applications are a growing trend and a trend heavily marketed by, not only Adobe, but now Mozilla, as ‘the future’.

While traditionally users have interacted mostly with desktop applications, more and more of them are using Web applications. But the latter often fit awkwardly into the document-centric interface of Web browsers.

In its current form, Prism doesn’t have the ability to function as a desktop application without access to the Internet, but Mozilla says it is “working to increase the capabilities of those apps by adding functionality to the Web itself, such as providing support for offline data storage and access to 3D graphics hardware.”

Instead of needing to run a browser to, for example, access Google Calendar, a simple icon can be clicked on the desktop. The icon will launch the Google Calendar application inside a Prism window, without any of the additional web browser bloat. This can have its benefits, especially when designing workflows and securing applications as the developer’s pain, the back button and address bar, are removed from the equation.

Although Mozilla may be excited about the concepts behind Prism, and Adobe about AIR not everyone shares the same enthusiasm, or has the working habits that require such an application-based approach. For some, the advantage of web applications is that they inherently aren’t desktop applications and everything can be handled in a single application almost anywhere on the planet, assuming a computer with a browser and web connection. However, Prism, AIR and Silverlight could end up offering the best of both worlds.

Companies need to make the most of Web 2.0, and web content management, collaboration and networking tools can help firms meet user demand for interactive websites. These tools aren’t simply restricted to the standard content management systems (CMS) used to publish text to a website, but tools that include file sharing, information sharing and instant messenging among others.

Effective web content management requires the capability for business leaders to take full control of the web as an interactive platform, rather than just treating it as another publishing medium. Keeping website visitors satisfied is a tough job. Currently, few corporate websites succeed with static, lifeless pages that lack interactivity. In contrast, pioneering websites, such as Amazon, Google and eBay set user’s expectations high with their compelling and dynamic content.

Because of these pioneering websites, the average visitor now expects targeted and personalised interactions with each and every company with which they come into contact on the web. In recent years the web content management franchise has expanded significantly beyond the 1990s paradigm of creation, management and publishing of content and other ‘resources’. As a result the tools are changing.

Ismael Chang Ghalimi has created an interesting list entitled Office 2.0 at IT|Redux. On this list, Ismael details a wide variety of web based business tools from bookmarking to business intelligence, calendars to contacts, databases to development tools, and beyond. What this list demonstrates is a shift towards new ways of data management, personalisation and targeting. New ways to interact with each and every interaction.

A recent survey from the Economist Intelligence Unit found that, despite early scepticism, “serious businesses” are starting to see that social networking technologies are not just for consumer sites such as YouTube and Facebook, but may also provide a major way for other brands to attract new customers and boost revenue.

 A compelling web experience is no longer based around simple web interactions, but around interactive tools.  The uptake of these tools, however, has been limited and we are only just seeing applications, such as wikis and blogs, join the corporate fold and become a generally accepted business tool.

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are just the beginning. A key trend taking place throughout the Web industry is the urgency to integrate disparate systems and software tools to reduce costs, increase developer productivity, reduce the need for manual processing and intervention in transactions, and decrease time to market. To achieve these objectives, organisations have endorsed the adoption of standards-based systems (e.g. XML, Design Patterns, CSS, ECMAScript) combined with the migration to Web Services and Service Orientated Architecture (SOA). This has led to a requirement to create a consistent and intuitive interface to applications, data and services. The immediate goal of these efforts is to provide simpler, quicker and more efficient access and processing of information. Increasingly, Web applications are also offering customers application interfaces that are more personalised and customised to each individual’s specific requests and requirements.

It is clear that RIAs offer the potential to fundamentally change the user experience and in doing so, yield significant business benefits. However, in order for RIAs to be widely employed, and for more companies to receive these kinds of returns, technologies to build RIAs will need to appeal to a wider range of developers. The ability to cost effectively create rich, engaging user experiences that support corporate objectives and reach a broader developer audience without sacrificing development productivity require a new generation of RIA tools. These tools are being developed by a large number of organisations with Adobe, Microsoft, Google, Apple and Sun leading the way with the AIR/Flash/Flex combination, Silverlight, Gears, Quicktime and JavaFX respectively.

The new generation of RIA tools being developed by the likes of Adobe and Microsoft must do the following to allow developers to truely harness the power of RIAs in the commercial environment:

1. Allow developers to write applications using familiar development models to utilise and extend their current skills without requiring them to adopt entirely new or different skills
2. Use standard and standards-based technologies
3. Use industry specific programming models and patterns
4. Use and/or leverage the existing IT infrastructure through wrap and reuse rather than rip and replace
5. Provide pervasive, familiar programming models and an expressive user interface across platforms and devices; and
6. Allow developers to create a solution that delivers scalable, secure, high performance solutions that are bandwidth efficient

These new RIA tools will need to provide the features that enhance IT developer’s abilities to be more creative and to accomplish RIA development with the same or less effort than the tools they use to create other types of applications. What is required are the tools that can help developers achieve these objectives without relying on only HTML or other scripting languages, or having to learn a completely new development approach.

Two vendors which have the technology and capaibility to fully deliver Rich Internet Applications are Adobe and Microsoft. With Microsoft’s Silverlight and XAML, developing rich internet applications to run on Windows platforms will progress at a fast rate. In turn, Adobe has had a head start with the aquisition of Macromedia and the subsequent addition of Flash and Flex to its product offering. Flash and its relative ubiquity across platforms and devices ensures that RIA development and production will be accessible to a large user base and as such puts Adobe at a distinct advantage over Microsoft.