Writing this post proved to be enormously tricky for some reason. I started out with this:
The trend set by Web 2.0 to move your applications into your browser is going at a hell of a rate. You can now do your email, your calendaring, your word processing, your spreadsheets, your slideshows, your project management, your IM, your photo organisation… all within your web browser.
The Benefits
The real reasons for using these services is that it means you can get your email, work, photos etc. (”your stuff”) from any computer with an internet connection. And as everything is hosted over on the service if your computer fails then your work is still safe. As it is continually backed up by the service you are using. So it is a pretty neat way to do things.
The other huge incentive comes with pricing. Online services tend to be powered by advertising or sponsorship and come generally free to the end user. This is a far cry from the big amounts you have to pay to just get a copy of Microsoft Office for instance.
The Problems
The main drawbrack is that the browser was not designed to host such a complex range of activities. The programs have to therefore be much simpler and tend to be much more fiddly than their desktop counterparts. The most basic task is ridiculously difficult to replicate in the browser in the same style. Not that this is a real problem to the end user they don’t have to code it! And luckily there are plenty of web programmers who seem more than willing to work flat out to produce near desktop style applications.
Where It Works
Some things work much better in the browser than others and these have been adopted much commonly. In these applications the ability to be able to access the information from any location is paramount. Tools like email clients are being replaced with webmail. Why? Because it is worth the loss in user experience to be able to get your emails from anywhere. And …
Then I thought “What is this a manual?”. Come on! I can do better than that. So I went for a completely different beginning:
What do you use most on your computer? If you are saying Notepad then you really aren’t the subject here. You may however be the target. I’m looking for those people that when they go and buy a computer from the physical computer shop they answer this question with: the internet, email, word oh yeah and messenger. They are then assured that their computer will be perfectly sufficient to do all those tasks. “It is a basic computer. It can handle the basic tasks that everyday users preform, and do so with ease” says the sales assistant. If you’ve heard those words and immediately written out the cheque then you are what I mean by “people” in this post. The normal people. They don’t have blogs, they don’t listen to podcasts, they don’t read digg. The Internet for them is the blue E. You probably know the type. It is the majority of people.
These are the people that I don’t think Web 2.0 is getting through to…
But then I realised that wasn’t what I wanted to write about at all. I still wasn’t really clear about what the title should be for the post. All I knew is I wanted to write something that generally said that the UI and user experience degrade is not always worth the upgrade in being able to access your information from everywhere. That was really the central statement I wanted to hit. But I didn’t want to go crazily detailed about everything everwhere like the first attempt. Or go way out of my way like I for some reason did in my second try. I need to get to the point, and get there fast. So this is how I eventually decided to start.
Stand back for the actual post. It is here.
