"If I weren’t jaded I’d think that RIA was the next big thing"

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“notaprguy” had a funny post in response to all of the news coming out about Apollo and WPF/E and everything else in the RIA space. As I read it again today, it struck a different cord, or maybe I’m just not sleeping enough. Here’s his quote:

If I weren’t jaded I’d think that RIA was the next big thing. Maybe even a bigger deal than its parent technobabble – Web 2.0.

I talk about it all the time, so clearly I think RIAs are the next big thing, but I also see them as an evolutionary step past Web 2.0 (not a segué into “Web 3.0″). With Web 2.0, we added a very social element to the web and we started to see the web as a platform for application delivery. We learned a lot, there was a ton of innovation, and we explored the boundaries of what web based applications looked like.

But just as with any other technology, the web isn’t perfect. We can’t take it with us, so if we’re offline, we don’t have access to it. By storing things on the web, we’ve giving our data to someone else, something some people aren’t a fan of. I see Rich Internet Applications as the convergence of what we learned about the web and what we already knew on the desktop. With RIAs, we have more knowledge than we did before, so we can make good decisions about the best medium (web, desktop, device) for our applications.

Now that we can do that more effectively, we can concentrate on things like experience in our software. We can think harder about design and spend more time on usability. It sounds kind of corny, and maybe I shouldn’t be blogging this late, but that’s why I get so stoked about RIAs. We’ve got enough knowledge to make good technology decisions, so we can start making better decisions about the experience we give users.

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  • http://www.ideataxi.com Sam Tilston

    I think web 3.0 will be about vertical search and different communities communicating together, for instance, myspace talking to facebook and digg talking to technorati.

  • http://notaprguy.wordpress.com/ notaprguy

    Thanks for the link. I basically agree with the way you framed RIA’s in your post today. What I get bothered about is the people who seem to think that Web apps are going to eliminate the need for client side applications including full blown Mac or Windows apps. I think that the better (for users) and more realistic scenario is that there is a very cool mix of pure Web apps (SaaS ala Gmail), RIA’s like the New York Times News Reader and Windows/Mac apps that consume Web services in interesting ways (like Google Earth). There is a tendency in the world of technology to think that the next big thing will REPLACE the stuff that came before. The reality is that it adds, not replaces.

  • Warren Henning

    If RIAs are the next big thing*, why is your blog published as HTML? :)

    *I think they are pretty interesting but I have no idea how to get started besides creating ugly toy interfaces.

  • http://www.jeffryhouser.com Jeffry Houser

    I’m jaded too. ( It’s why I think we make great foils on the web cast ). Is RIA the first “next big thing” of your career?

    The “next big thing” comes up quite a lot. Often times they fizzle without actually delivering. Maybe in 5 years, the RIA will be seen a simple stepping stone to something else if anyone ever remembers it.

    Warren, A typical blog doesn’t really benefit from being an RIA. The interface for posting to your blog might. A multi-blog reader might. But, a single blog doesn’t.

    Gotta use the right tool for the job.