The next step in the web world of user-generated content is not new ways of generating content, but new ways of consuming more content at once. This new quality of web pages pulling content from different sources and displaying it to the user in one integrated view has become popular with Web 2.0, because a user can see other related things around him, and see how everything connects. An example of a company that nails this is Google. Take a look at any Google Finance page. Google supplies the graph, and a little of the data about the company. However, the majority of it is taken from other places, be it another Google source, such as Google Blog Search, or a non-Google source, such as Reuters statistics. Google makes less work for itself by pulling in data from AOL Finance and Yahoo Finance on its pages, look in the right sidebar. This is also evident in other Google products. Intelligent laziness is a stellar quality in a software developer, and this enables developers and corporations to be lazy and focus on what they're good at (In Google's case, indexing stuff) instead of trying to spread a broad net over every area they could possibly attempt to compete in.
With this new paradigm, there is some risk of confusing the user; all of the other stuff on the page may distract from the main data. However, if the main focus of the page is really big, this should not be an issue. Such mash-ups are made possible by open web APIs and search engines that index everything and then provide that content. It is worthy to note that this is the same strategy that Google uses for online advertising: it displays relevant links next to the content, which the user may become distracted by. If sites use Google's API in this way, it also provides Google with a chance to serve more ads, users are pointed at Google Blog Search and other Google services. Isn't it great that developers can be lazy?
No comments:
Post a Comment