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07 Jun

My Love Hate Relationship with Web 2.0, Part Deux

Posted June 7th, 2007 | View Comments

In Part I of this phenomenally popular article series, I was able to get through the amble and the preamble and finally arrive at the vague threat that this series might indeed contain an article. Tonight I am goaded, inspired — nay, nurtured — by the lovely Austin Realtor’s Wife, Lani Anglin, aka the prettier half of this science-fictiony Blue Brainy Guy, who’s initials I think are BR but after all this is Web 2.0 and who the heck are we?  Lani (who’s not Jen Kay, in case you were wondering) asked me the question the other day that was the basis for this whole article: “So tell me about your love hate relationship with Web 2.0.” At about the same time, Mr. Lani, the blue brainy guy, who’s also not Athol Kay, the latter being a sock puppet, posted a similar essay that’s worth reading on his site.

Actually I’ve gone through a transformation in the last day or two. I’ve decided to really see if there’s something in the Web 2.0 world for me. That is to say, I am a web 2.0 penitent. A lot of my softened attitude toward Web 2.0 probably traces ultimately to the fact that I’ve landed squarely in the AJAX / Javascript / OPC (Other People’s Code) aspect of Web 2.0 in my map site. So that’s as good a place to begin as any.

Other Peoples’ Code

Yes, I know, we have widgets and gizmaux and plugins and sidebars we can put them in.

Rah.

Admittedly: my code isn’t the best in the world. I was a good full time programmer at one time, made a living at it, but I wasn’t the Tiger Woods of the keyboard or anything. But here are a couple of things about my code: We don’t need multiple DNS resolutions for it, typically, because we’ve done that. Also, I control it, so if it stinks, I know who to holler at to get it fixed. Also, I can try to make it somewhat fast.

I like Jim Cronin. I really do. I hope he didn’t get run over by a team of articles about teams. I’m a bit worried about him. But (at the risk of picking on him), Jim’s site takes some ten seconds to finish loading. I know — not a big deal, you can see the Tomato and start reading the article, but I still want to see the page finish loading. As a developer, who used to pay attention to such things knowing a customer would holler at me, it’s a distraction.

Where does that slow load time come from? Other Peoples’ Code, of course. Jim has many of the latest bells and whistles, as well he should — I should have a house, by the same token. My site, which only has a couple of Javascript links, one so I can see if NikNik or the Sock Puppet or Jen Kay are reading me as they should be. I just installed that the other day. The other bit is so Hittail can make inane suggestions, like telling me I should be blogging about “electronic signatures 2007″. Hittail’s so fun. Yet even with just those two, I’m up to three seconds. A “static” (minimal PHP) page on the same site takes just over a second to finish doing its thing.

It Was the Best of Code, It Was The Worst of Code

But look: Google, and Yahoo — who between them probably spend more on keyboards than I make in a year — have competing, free APIs to put maps on your site. How cool is that? I have a whole blog growing up around Other Peoples’ Code, so I don’t want to make it seem all bad. We’ve now serving developer man hours, free, through a series of tubes. And not just code, either. We’re structuring data over here using XML and consuming it over there using plain old stateless HTTP. How fun is that?

I’ll bet Al Gore never dreamed of such applications when he invented the telephone.

What’s also neat about that is that we’re publishing what we’re doing as we’re doing it, so all us men may be working on the chain gang, but we sure make a lovely sound.

I’m not so sure how many more installments there will be of this, but I’ll let you know when I’m done so you can get on with other classics like Charles Dickens or what have you.

  • http://www.realtorgenius.com B.R

    I thought Al Gore invented electricity? Funny piece, I think you’re exactly where I am coming from on the article I wrote, I like your writing because you make fun of yourself and have fun… Great blog.

    thanks for the mention… BR

  • http://www.reagentinct.com Sock Puppet

    Um a couple slight though understandable errors here John.

    Jen Kay is in fact my wife and not married to the Brainy Blue Guy. Jen was scourced as posts a couple time at Realtor Wives and ended up with her picture on the sidebar.

    The actual author of Realtor Wives is Lani Anglin. Lani hoped Jen would turn into a regular poster, but Jen isn’t much of a blogger type.

    If you’re confused John. Don’t feel bad. B.R. is the husband of Lani and apparently he didn’t catch the mix up either. :-)

    The comments about load times are good points.

  • http://www.sacramento-home.com/real-estate-agents/ John Lockwood

    Well, that’s interesting — I was wondering if she was related to you.

    It looks like I’ve inadvertantly invented a new reality game show: Realtor wife swap!

    Let’s hope the Fox network doesn’t steal this idea…

  • http://www.reagentinct.com Sock Puppet

    Incidentally one of the reasons I just dumped Meebo was it was looking like it was taking a long time to respond for me and botching my page loads.

    -Athol

  • http://www.sacramento-home.com/real-estate-agents/ John Lockwood

    Yes, slowness is bad, but not yet. :)

    I’ll fix those errors…stay tuned.

  • http://www.valleymarket.com Marty Van Diest

    Ha…get a kick out of your writing John. It’s easier to understand when I’m wide awake though.

  • http://www.hittail.com/ Mike Levin of HitTail

    Wow, what a blog post! Perhaps processing services like the Amazon Elsatic Computing Cloud will ultimately solve problems like this. Apps could be written and beta-tested on any environment. But then when they’re ready for prime time, moved over to a highly assured 24/7 up-time server platform. All of us in the Web 2.0 world feel the pain of what happens if a server gets bogged down. It’s almost like DNS needs to be better, getting a busy-signal and forwarding IP. Sure, that could be done at the application level. But imagine if servers (IPs) could publish their load-balancing state and the DNS system did the rest. No one would ever need to buy a load balancer. You just host your app in a couple of places around the world, and let the system do the rest.

  • http://www.sacramento-home.com/real-estate-agents/ John Lockwood

    Wow, Mike, thanks for stopping by! You defninitely make some excellent suggestions and comments that strain the limits of my atrophied Software brain. (“That poor guy? He’s a real estate broker now…”). Clearly hittail is in great technical hands.

    And I should also point out since you were nice enough to focus on the technical aspects and not my shortcomings, that my characterization of hittail as a maker of innane comments is really unfair. You guys have an awesome service that of course is automated, so the suggestions need to be filtered by a reasonable human being. And I definitely don’t think your code is fat or anything like that — if I did, believe me, I wouldn’t let it on this page. (I save the “fat” appplications for resolving 10 addresses to latitude / longitude pairs per page over the wire on my map site — but I’m at least still developer enough to know that that’s a prototype that needs to get fixed later).

    Historically I’ve done well with the short tail, but as Hittail shows me, the long tail accounts for some two thirds of the results. Indeed, the map blog project is really a sort of long tail experiment in a way. I would definitely advise folks who are just starting their campaigns today to live by the long tail. Also, I’ve heard rumors that the long tail results actually convert better. Do you have anything sold to that effect?

    Again, thanks so much for the visit, and please forgive my offhandedness about your fine product. I really do like it and appreciate it and certainly didn’t mean to mischaracterize it.

  • http://www.connors.com/team/mike-levin.html Mike Levin of HitTail

    You don’t need to apologize to me for offhandedness. If I had thin skin, I wouldn’t be doing this. Just today, I posted a very polite thank-you to a reviewer who said if they had to choose us or our competitor, they’d choose them. What better input could we ask for! You sound very technical for a real estate agent, and made some points about DNS that made me feel free to comment about how Internet infrastructure could be better.

    Our data ab out how well the long tail searches convert is only anecdotal as well. We haven’t built a conversion tracker, as we’re going for ultimate light-weight code (as you may have noticed). We literally stop tracking after the first hit of the session, making us unique in the Web 2.0 world as the least-chatty tracker.

    Anyway, I ramble again. Nice site you have here. Good example of clear objectives and call-to-action being pervasive, and every “landing page” having a chance of getting the conversion without requiring some prescribed click-path. Good stuff.

  • http://www.sacramento-home.com/real-estate-agents/ John Lockwood

    Wow, thanks for the kind words. Yes, being an ex-programmer definitely makes me something of a engineer-type among salespeople. It’s all good.

  • http://www.sacramento-home.com/real-estate-events/2007/web-20-part-30_583.html Web 2.0, Part 3.0

    [...] who were waiting for Part III of the Article Series on My Love Hate Relationshiop with Web 2.0 (See Part II or Part I), please note we’ve moved the series to a more Web 2.0-ish sort of Place, [...]

  • http://www.agentscoreboard.com/blog Agent Scoreboard

    John…
    Your writing style is very entertaining and full of wit. You missed your calling as a sitcom writer.

    Great blog. I would leave a comment, but most everything you said I agree with and anything I have to say would be pitifully redundant

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