Last night while having supper at Holland Village with Garis, his girlfriend and Pasha, Garis mentioned that I have not stopped update my blog of late. Or rather most of my writings has recently be restricted mainly to that of more superficial matters, aka the ones I posted on ThingsToDoSingapore.com.
In essence, contemplating on issues pertaining to that which is material is of lesser difficulty as compared to issues that are abstract in nature. An example belonging to the former category of contemplation would be “the sky is blue”. It is trivial and requires not any deep analytical consideration past the point of making the observation that the sky is indeed blue.
An example belonging to the latter category of contemplation would be “can the sky ever be made to look green?”. One comes not easily to a conclusion in this instance. The points for consideration are inexhaustive and requires extensive periods of contemplation. Furthermore, there could be multiple conclusions drawn from the same train of thought of varying validity. Contemplation of such matters comes also hand in hand with the consideration of the repercussions and opportunities should such a possibility come into existance.
To engage in abstract thinking, one requires a certain amount of personal space, in laymen terms time alone.
Of course, why the sky is blue and how it can ever look green is not of my interest. The matter of interest for me has remained one and the same for the past 2 months ever since I left Silicon Valley. “What is the defining difference between a web site and a web application?” I believe this one statement will remain a central theme in my thoughts over the next year at least.
Borrowing the concept from “the world is flat”, technologist who consider himself a web site designer or programmer and who choose to remain so will soon be relegated to the back seat. With the proliferation of tools ,applications and increased availability of Chinese or Indian human resources, their professions has been slowly downgraded from the traditional chocolate topping to the vanilla cream. They will experience increasing competition and face lower and lower profit margins in the long run.
The new prevailing trend will require a new class of talents known as web application designers, people who are able to envision a somewhat abstract notion and turn it into a concrete working full featured web application, aka product designers of the web. A few days ago I heard over the news, Singapore will over the next few months start a Masters program for design. Quoted from one of the spokesperson “this program will attempt to boost the level of innovative thinking amongst the human resource belonging to the Singapore workforce”. This short piece of news vindicated my matter of interest to be current and relevant.
Back to the notion of the web application versus the web site. At a glance the mere observer might not notice any difference between these two groups. However further analysis will reveal that a web application is in fact a sub set of the web sites group, with a restricted set of functionalities that aim to fulfill a small related group of use cases. It may or may not be social in nature however it will deploy very extensively the use of Ajax, taking into deep consideration the usability experience as well as programmability (exposed APIs).
Good examples are
- google document for word processing
- google mail for business communications
- twitter for short messaging and rss feeding
- facebook for social network
- foursquare for mobile location exploration
- tweet deck for real time trending
- google map for geo location
- youtube for video crowd sourcing
- flickr for image crowd sourcing
During this period of consolidation, I have been engaged in the building of two prototypes. The first as all will have known by now is ThingsToDoSingapore.com. To date, it remains still a conceptual experimentation of what the new web has to offer.
The other which will remain underwraps until it is ready for launch is a mobile based application that runs on the Andriod platform, the choice of which is well explained in this article Woz: Apple Almost Launched A Phone In 2004, Android Will “Win The Race” on TechCrunch.
The new trend also brings into this new consideration of what is truly worth building. In the event whereby a tool already exists, the coming into being of a second tool of similar nature without the potential of fulfilling at least one critical use case that has not bee thus far fulfilled by the first will be somewhat worthless and waste of time to build. With this in mind and taking into further consideration that time is a priceless resource that money cannot buy, I have become hesitant in taking on any new projects that is in my opinion not worth coming into existance, despite the enthusiasm of the potential client. Hence in conclusion my time and effort has become seemingly decoupled from money.