Monthly Wrap Up

The end of April’s getting close, which means that summer’s on it’s way and making it’s presence felt.  As a web developer I’m still feeling the after-shocks of Facebook’s F8 conference.  A lot of things were presented, but as the biggest platform on the web even their smallest change sends seismic waves through the foundations of what we build upon.  Connect is dead, OAuth 2.0 is the future, arguably the meta-point aggregation system I was talking about earlier will be Facebook Points, the like button will come to a wide variety of pages on the web, iFrames are the new way of integrating, and a huge user/web backlash may be coming, nobody knows.  This year is going to be a tumultuous one, the iPad is fighting to break out of it’s shell, mobile is coming on strong and people are starting to make real money, the economy’s still in the toilet in a lot of places and nobody knows what the future really holds for the environment.  Apple, Google and Microsoft are having a three way shadow war for the future of the tech industry, with Facebook as the dark horse coming up fast and Amazon as the incumbent punching bag.  Yahoo’s off in a corner crying to itself.

It’s a good thing that new development platforms make creating sites and systems easy, because nobody knows what’s going to happen or be the state of the art in a year.  Will Facebook Points be the next Flooz or will they be the next PayPal?  300 million users is a pretty good head start.

Buzz Generating Idea of the Day

So here’s a buzz generating idea for one of your designer friends: Create a witty poster-style page ala How To Use An Apostrophe, but for when to Reply All.  Put it on it’s own domain name, sell posters through a print on demand service, have a ‘know someone who doesn’t know when to use the proper reply?  let them know!’ email sharing link.  If you come up with a particularly clever graphic, put it on a shirt.  Digg, Facebook fan page, all the social media options.  Generate links for a few weeks and watch the visitors count balloon.

Channel Your Inner April Fool

April 1st is always a tricky day to be online.  Even pre-web, I remember when LambdaMOO had a LambdaMUCK (Or was that MUSH?) April Fools event.  April Fools pranks challenge your fundamental assumptions.  Some April Fools pranks are funny and obvious, some are not and some fall into a strange realm of inspired wonderfulness.  It struck me today that a lot of things that make for a compelling web application are the same things that make a great April Fools project so wonderful.  They’re unexpected, they reward the visitor and they encapsulate a creative concept in a limited scope.  April Fools projects have to be limited since we don’t have a lot of time to work on them and they have to be interesting since that’s the whole point.  It’s a shame that so many projects are hum-drum day to day, full of never ending feature creep, only to have a burst of great creativity once a year that only lasts one day.  April Fools may be a great excuse to think outside the box and create a magical user experience, but we should be doing that every day.