New Delhi Times

Ajaxian.com has a good round up of the recently concluded AJAX summit. I believe it was first of its kind and its a clear sign of things to come. I am always intrigued at how fast buzzwords become popular over the internet, and particulary over the blogosphere. The technology that enables AJAX has been around for years. But only now it is getting so much attention. I believe Google has had a big role in this. They have really pushed the envelope with their rich web applications and managed to do what was previously thought impossible.
Around December last year, Ashish and myself created our own first AJAX application. It was a blog indexing search engine (which we affectionately called Bloogle) with a Google Suggest
type interface. It was done over a period of 5-7 days solely to impress a prospective client. I have reasons to believe that our client was impressed
Since then, I have come across Laszlo and I feel it has the potential to become the preferred platform for developing Rich Internet Applications. Laszlo was created from the ground up for developing RIAs while AJAX is an innovative use of an existing technology (XMLHttp and Javascript). Microsoft’s next gen windows client platform called Avalon also aims to enable rich internet as well as desktop applications. Interestingly Avalon uses a similar XML markup based approach for creating the user interface as Laszlo. It will be interesting to see if Laszlo community (Laszlo is open source) will try to create any migration tools to enable seamless transition to Avalon from Laszlo, once Longhorn is released.

As I was driving to work bleary eyed and half dazed, I had a brainwave. We talk so much about Social Networking and we are trying to build a variety of social networks. But the fact is that today’s social networks are less social and more socialist. A social network treats all its members as equals. If Bill Gates and myself both signed up on Orkut, we would both be equal in priviliges. Sure, Bill will have 35000 friends more than me, and maybe a few thousand testimonials more as well (not all of them very kind I am sure ), but other than that there won’t be much to differentiate two people who in the real world have starkly different status in the society. So, essentially, social networks naively follow the socialist/idealist principle of “All men are equal”. While that is great – and noble, if I may add, it makes a social network boring. And this is the reason why a Bill Gates or a Sachin Tendulkar will never join a social network. With one click of a mouse, they are reduced to the status of a commoner. Not to mention the barrage of invites, requets and spam they will attract.
On the other extreme are invite-only networks like aSmallWorld which caters to high net worth individuals. It is a safe haven for the rich and famous to communicate, and mingle in general. But by excluding the common folks, aSmallWorld also doesn’t simulate the real world.
Of course, one could argue that why would one even want to simulate the real world, imperfect as it is. Well, I don’t know. But it sure seems like an interesting idea to me. An anti-social network with all the class hierarchies and realities of the real world. Some would have more priviliges, more powers. Not all would be born equal, so to speak. It might have some niche application also in certain kind of networks where the class hierarchy is apparent. For example, in the world of business, the clients often have an upper hand and vendors clamor for business. In the job market, the employers often have the upper hand (unless its the IT industry – do you know DHTML? Please call me!). So who knows, there just might be a case for anti-social networks.