Looking For Trends
Posted on April 5, 2008 by Chris
I’ve been a bit delinquent in putting up new posts lately as I’ve been distracted with some other projects but more important I’ve just not found anything that I wanted to write about. There is certainly a lot going on out there as is clear from the latest TechCrunch postings from the Next Web Conference in Amsterdam but so far I’m not seeing much in the way of new trends.
That being said, there are a couple of things that I’ve written about previously that seem to be gaining steam.
Widgets are in general, picking up steam. It seems like daily (hourly?) you hear of yet another Facebook widget or iGoogle widget that is going to change your life. No some of these are pretty cool, don’t get me wrong, but I’m beginning to wonder whether we are seeing a fundamental break between a self contained, fully functional site like WebMD that solves a specific problem and a world in which everything is a collection of much more specialized widgets that you access from lots of different channels - and ideally follow you around from channel to channel.
This is worth more thought (and postings!) in the future. I’m also waitig for a widget search engine to launch - finding all these things is a major pain today.
The other rumor I thought was particularly interesting was the one about Google launching a cloud database solution that would compete with the one started awhile back by Amazon. As I’ve written before, the key with these services is to get true generic, scalability without sacrificing the real power of the database. As every developer knows, often you need to do some funky stuff to get a database to perform which is why I’m really curious as to whether the cloud computing approach will work for the majority of web sites out there - which are the obvious target for these sort of services.
The other really challenge here is not so much getting the database up and running (and scaling), but actually designing and loading it with data. That might be the value add that really gets these services off the ground. Imagine a situation in which you could just grab a set of database components from a central library (say a list of the cities of the world) for use on your web page and someone else would keep them up to date. Now there is a service that would be worth paying for. Oh yeah, and what about loading those feeds.
More to come on this trend I predict.
Sphere: Related Content» Filed Under Cloud Computing, Content Disaggregation, Social Networking
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