We learn new things every day

Most people in our business will agree "we learn new things every day". Yesterday however it wasn't business as usual. Our own snowboard expert Volkert taught us the basics of snowboarding! It's amazing how a good lesson of an hour can actually teach you the basics of something enitrely new. Besides the fact that it was good fun, this session will be a real life saver when our whole company will go snowboarding for 3 days in Valloire France this January :-)

All those identities

All those webbased services which you can use for free are great, but boy don't you hate all those identities ? For every website you need to be logged on to have the service you need and they all use their own user database. Well Yahoo is helping us by buying services like Flickr and now Del.icio.us. Also I see plenty of opportunity to share the tags that both mentioned websites use. Now Yahoo owns them both, I expect to see things like shared tags between Flickr and Del.icio.us. Expect to be able to manage your tags on a Yahoo based level and use those tags for both pictures you like and bookmarks. Read what Del.icio.us has to say about the Yahoo deal.

Why AJAX sucks (most of the time)

Today I read this interesting article about AJAX from usability-guru Jakob Nielsen. After reading it I must say that I agree with it on a lot of points. This may not seem remarkable, but it is actually once you know this whole article is a spoof. It's a slightly rewritten version of Jakob Nielsen's original article Why Frames suck (most of the time), which he wrote in 1996(!).

This article generated a lot of discussion among bloggers, because many of them missed the fact it's fake. Some interesting reactions on "Jakob's article" can be found here, here and here.

I think AJAX already is a very important factor in the current transition to web 2.0. Webapplications like Gmail, Writely and Flickr all use AJAX. But this doesn't mean I recommend the use of AJAX to all of our customers. Only use it if it really leads to a better user experience, otherwise stick to the good old webstandards. After all, it's just a technique.

technorati tags:ajax usability web2.0

Ray Ozzie shares his vision

This was actually an internal Microsoft memo, but it has been widely distributed on the web. First Ray Ozzie gives us a small history lesson and then he shows us the future. Quite interesting to read.