the thpinfo.com blogger archives (2007-2008)

Dreaming beyond Web 2.0.

In recent months, many "Web2.0-ish" applications have been popping up around the web. This week, I've found Shelfari, a social book listing website where users can list books they own or have read. It's a nice idea, especially for users that read a lot of books.

For every "Web2.0-ish" application out there, there is some means of integrating the content on your website/blog/etc. You can add a "My Books" box from Shelfari, have a Photostream box from Flickr or put your recently played tracks from last.fm on your website.

I don't like at least two facts about today's "Web2.0" applications:

• data is stored on the service provider's servers
• accessing the data is only possible using some AJAX-/browser-based UI

Data storage: I'd like to use my own web server for data storage, possibly synchronizing to some other web server on the 'net for backups. This way, I have total control over my data and can decide whether I want to delete or keep some data and easily "upload" lots of data in an easy way (HTTP form uploads just suck!). I could imagine a post-Web2.0 application letting the user define a "data store" - maybe an URL to a WebDAV repository. If the user has her own webserver, she can use that, or buy some WebDAV space from another vendor.

AJAX/browser-based UI: Of course, there are frontends for Flickr, etc.. but most of the time, these services are used through the browser. For a 64k ISDN user like me, using AJAX-based applications is a drag. Desktop applications are fast and slick and have a more unified and stable UI than browser apps. What I really like to have are many small Desktop applications that interact with web services

This week, I installed Ross Burton's Tasks application (version 0.9 released last week) - a really slick tasks manager (see screenshots on website) that uses EDS as its backend store. "Tasks" is really great - it's a nicely-integrated Desktop app (and also works on mobile devices). If Tasks would interface with some web-based data store (a sort of web service-version of EDS), and this web-based data store would be accessed through WebDAV, that would be some great Web2.0-ish application/data storage setup.

Web2.0 applications currently centralize both the UI and the data store. What I'd like to see in the future are nicely-integrated, slick Desktop applications like "Tasks" that interface with web-based data stores. For the data stores, I'd like to have the option to host all my personal data on some WebDAV repository, be it on my own server or on some commercial/free web space provider. Oh, yes: and make a good WebDAV client into every browser so I can drag-and-drop files instead of using some stupid HTTP form upload.

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Comments

Ross (2007-06-30T22:05:00.000+02:00)
With a one line change to Tasks, you could use it to manipulate a task list on a remote CalDAV server. I don't know of any public todo list applications that expose their data over CalDAV, but you could run one yourself.

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Thomas Perl (thp at this domain); jabber: thp@jabber.org