RIAs: Saving the Web from the Dull and Boring

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Another Sunday, another semi-pointless meme, and I was going to leave it be except for a post by Richard MacManus and a comment there by Rick Curran. The gist is this: Mark Cuban says that the web has “stabilized as a platform” and as a result, innovation has stagnated, things are boring and we’re no longer creating “explosively exciting ideas”.

I think he has a bit of a point and he ties it back to the lack of advancement in true broadband speed as part of the culprit. He’s not saying the internet is dead, he’s just saying that it’s becoming a commodity or a utility. It’s tough to be innovative with something like electricity or water. That’s part of the reason I think this is a great time for rich internet applications. Web applications aren’t cutting it. We need more broadband and we need more touch points. We need better experiences. RIA technologies enable a lot of rich media content, something which people can build innovative, creative solutions on top of. RIAs can help bring the worlds of desktop, web, and mobile together and that’s going to bring about all kinds of new use cases for applications as well as new business models and modes of communication.

Now that the internet is boring we’ve got a stable delivery platform. Let’s think about rich media, better user experiences and closer integration with devices and innovate in that space. That’s where rich internet applications shine.

Related posts:

  1. Some Good Thoughts on the Future of RIAs
  2. RIAs on Read/Write Web’s 2007 Web Predictions
  3. IBM on Technology options for RIAs
  4. Are They Still RIAs if They Are Desktop Applications?
  5. The iPhone Helps Prove why RIAs are Important
  • http://www.sinsur.com Consumer

    New world brings us many new technologies and if we want to be the first in our activity we must use this achivements

  • http://www.astoriablogs.com/rich-media/ Dan Ortega

    Rather than saying the web is “stagnating”, I would look at this more as “winding up” before another explosive growth phase. I agree with your comments that RIAs will probably drive the next phase of growth, the question is what is the operating and delivery context of RIAs? Filtering out entertainment as the primary driver, and assuming people are actually looking for better depth of information (a picture is worth a thousand words), it seems to me that rich media needs better management infrastructure before it really takes off as an enterprise-grade deliverable. XML is a good step in this direction, DITA is a better step, and I know parts of Adobe and their surrounding cottage industry are looking at this, so it should be interesting to watch over the next several months and years.

  • http://developers.curl.com/blog/ Bert Halstead

    I think you’re right to say that there is still a lot of room for innovation. Certainly anybody in the 1950s who said that it’s hard to be innovative with electricity because it’s become a commodity that most everybody has access to would have missed foreseeing many things that have happened since then!

    I also agree that RIA is a prime place to look for this innovation. One of the things that I foresee is the true elimination of the gap between Web-deployed and locally installed applications. We already have Web-deployed RIAs like Google Spreadsheets that can compete with locally installed applications like Excel for some purposes, but the Web-deployed spreadsheet is really tethered to the Web and can’t be used independently from it. One big reason is that the client-side implementation framework (JavaScript) just doesn’t have the horsepower to run an industrial-strength spreadsheet all on its own, so it needs help from the server. Building RIAs on a client-side platform that’s just as powerful as the platforms that support locally installed apps will enable us to finally close this gap and deploy applications over the Web without any compromises.

    That’s the mission that has motivated my employer (Curl) and me for years, and I think we’re finally getting closer to the point where the market for this convergence opens up.

  • http://www.mutinydesign.co.uk/scripts/ David Hopkins

    Ben raises some interesting points there. One thing it bears remembering is that a lot of people don’t like the interfaces provided by derivatives of flash. They just don’t look like native parts of the web.