The web application in permanent beta is the latest fashion in today’s Internet world. Some folks believe that after several years of testing, that web applications ought to shed the beta tag and call themselves stable.
I disagree.
Open source desktop software is significantly more flexible than a closed source web application in terms of giving what users want. Desktop applications have extensibility through plugins, extensions, themes, and so forth. Web applications currently have only a weak extensibility through Greasemonkey.
Facebook Apps are closer to true extensibility, but Facebook remains in control over Facebook Apps, which results in rumors that Facebook is going to close down third party apps. Developers creating extensions of desktop applications usually do not have to worry about their extensions being wiped off the face of the Earth.
Also regarding Facebook, some users are not happy with Facebook’s transition to a new user interface. There is even a petition for the old user interface to return. I suggest you compare Facebook to Wordpress. Nobody is going to force a blogger to upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress, but there is little one can do if Facebook decides to switch to a different (and worse, in the mind of the user) UI.
Does my blog post ring a bell? Oh yeah, this blog post sounds roughly similar to Richard Stallman’s opinions on cloud computing. Stallman is dead right. One should only truly trust open source software on hardware within the ownership of the user.
So where does the whole “keep Web 2.0 apps in permanent beta” idea come into play? My point is that Web 2.0 apps ought to keep themselves in permanent beta as a reminder to users that no Web 2.0 app outside of the user’s control is as safe as an application within the user’s control.
The opinions on something can change pretty quickly. At first, all the bloggers were saying how FriendFeed is the new Twitter. People started flocking to FriendFeed because of it’s simple brilliance. At the start, there were some complaints, such as the lack of an API, but the FriendFolks said it was in the works. When the API was launched, bloggers started comparing it to Facebook and said that FriendFeed was the new cool platform to be writing code for. FriendFeed apps started coming out, along with Alert Thingy, a FriendFeed client written with Adobe AIR.
Once people got used to their shiny new Web 2.0 toy, they started to notice two things.
First, FriendFeed scatters conversations. If a blogger’s latest post gets put on his or her FriendFeed page, people can comment directly through FriendFeed. People that don’t use FriendFeed, but use some other RSS reader to keep track of posts would comment directly on the blog. Those that don’t use FriendFeed don’t know about the conversation going on there. You have the conversations scattered all over, which is something you don’t want with a service that tries to aggregate a bunch of web services into one source.
Some simple workarounds came for this. An example of this is the FriendFeed comments plugin for Wordpress. These aren’t really enough to put the conversations back into one piece.
The second problem with Friendfeed is the noise. FriendFeed users started complaining about how much content there was on FriendFeed that they didn’t find interesting. FriendFeed supports a “hide” function, that supports hiding on various conditions, like hiding all of a specific friend’s Twitter posts unless they have comments or “likes” on them. Louis Gray wrote a post that outlines five ways to use “hide” in FriendFeed.
Simply hiding more stuff didn’t cut the complaints. That can be illustrated by looking at the results of this Lifehacker poll asking their readers their opinions on FriendFeed. At the time, 26.1% of people that participated in that poll said that there is too much content to subscribe to with FriendFeed without being completely overwhelmed.
I would have to politely disagree with those two and say that if noise is useful, then it isn’t really noise. Now the most exciting part is to wait and see how FriendFeed, and the opinions of bloggers, changes.
In the true spirit of experimenting with code and all things computer-related, one or two visitors (who viewed the site or requested the feed in a window of about two minutes) may have noticed six extra posts briefly appear in the archives. That was me.
See, possible248 today granted myself and i80and admin status within WordPress (I’ll have to talk to possible248 about his capitalization), and I have been exploring the options offered in the control panel. One of the tabs that intrigued me greatly was the import tab, which offers many options for importing content from other platforms:
That… is… so many platforms. Blogger being there is of particular interest, because I currently write for several blogs hosted on Blogger, my own among them.
So, to explain why six posts appeared on this site briefly: I decided to give the import a try on the smallest blog.
The import was completed very quickly using Google Data APIs. After the import was complete, I was given the opportunity to change the author of posts. I must say I am very impressed with WordPress’ ability to grab content from so many (13 plus itself) different sources.
It’s also reassuring to know that, if I ever choose I no longer like Blogger and want to host my own site, it will be a piece of cake to move to WordPress (which is what I’d probably choose). The only question there is moving back to Blogger if I ever decide to do that. But both situations are far out in the future, reserved for when I have the time and money to maintain my own hosting.
Meanwhile, I consider this experiment a success. Go WordPress!
