Bloggers’ve been used to the fact that blogs only allow us to write for the time being and future, but not the past, unless you change date from database. So, based on that assumption, blog systems provide all kinds of post categorization and visualization, tag cloud say.

But when I open this site(Dandelife), in 1 second I was greatly inspired. The timeline concept perfectly fit in here! Comparing to my post cloud, which looks quite messy, this thing is well-organized, clear, and interesting! They proved that time can go backwards! :P

Function-wise, there is a public timeline, where the stories are randomly chosen from users and each one has his/her own timeline. The timelines shown are from about 1970 to 2010, but you can drill down to year level, in which stories in that year are broken down into months.

So now:

• If you find an old photo of you under your coach, you can post your memory on and you can never lose it.
• If you have some really fun stories of your childhood that you suddenly remember, no hesitate should you save it.
• Unless you are 2 years old and start to write a blog, all the way till you are 70, you might find creating a lifetime long story timeline, especially when you can catch up from the past, is really interesting. Passing them on to your children. (That’s a bit too far to forsee, but it’s not a bad idea, is it?)

As well, they integrated flickr with the edit page. It might look like nothing special, but when I was planning my next project, I realized that I will face the image storage problem, if I would like users to be able to add images. I definitely cannot offer image storage, and I came up with the work-around, use flickrs! Then I recalled these guys’ work. Smart move!

Saw this mini statistics of some of the most known social network sites from TechCrunch. MySpace tops in the ranking and left the second, Facebook, whose founder is the controversial young man Mark Zuckerberg, way behind the horizontal line.

Facebook would catch up a bit in next few months, based on its announcement of open registration. Now anyone can have an account without having to be from Universities that the system recognizes.

Now, just look at these websites, most of them looks quite sketchy, in terms of graphics and interactions. Very few gradient, no round corners and other sort of refinement. Blinking advertisements eliminate all the white space and distract users.

If a normal web service, like news portal, music download, or newly lauched blogs, ever looks like that, visitors would immediately run away. However, these some millions of unique visitors, do stay on site, neglecting eye-hurting ads and keep browsing for excitement, as the sites supposed to offer.

What’s the success factor behind the scene? Technology and even Visual Appealness are not as important as they are to other websites. Without these, the only thing I can see that make MySpace successful is it allows to users to customize their own pages, to an extent that no others allow to. How many people left msnspace or still refuse to use it because of its lack of freedom of layout and template customization. And how many people feel timid being told that cannot access ones profile because the person is not in my network yet.

“…Technology and even Visual Appealness are not as important…”

MySpace removed all these constrains and allows anyone, even unregistered users to browse register users pages. Also, users can add any objects to their personal pages, YouTube, flashes, windows media player, as well as set transparency and background images etc.. To me those pages look totally unpolished and lack artful overall look. But I guess young people are tough and are able to survive and expand their life on those. Ya, so maybe the generation is fairly “realistic” actually, as contents are most important, over-emphasized decorations not neccessary. :)

Besides, I am looking forward to Facebook to grow too.

Well, it seems that we’ve got into a real “No idea is too crazy” paradise. 3 weeks ago I post something about webware, and “imagined” a central OS that users can connect to from browser, and now it’s becoming reality! Anyhow, the webOS concept is still in discussion. Many people, including myself, have concerns about its application in the future, many issues have been raised. See the original post from the link below.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/…_vs_browser_apps.php

I quoted a section of it and would like to try to analyze a bit of the downsides we see from today’s point.

Analsis of the Downsides

• This issue is not only imposed on WebOSs, indeed most of web services are based on this server and client model. Everything we do largely depend on the performance of the server, and potentially there could be a failure of the system and we cannot do anything about the service. Just like we use MSN so often and even though it occasionally fails or rejects us from logging in, we don’t feel as if it’s the end of the world. Fortunately accountablity and stability are something websites and web service providers cherished to have, presumably. The bottom line would be, if you find comfort to transmit or store some sensitive information through or in a public email system, you might not feel less comfort to store them in a WebOS;
• Performance is the next big issue. According to today’s browser technology, relied on which even a smooth fading effect is not really “smooth”, it is such a turn down to imagine a graphic intense WebOS. Yet, the development of technology always turns out to be out of people’s expectation, in a relatively long term, say 20 years. Now step back from fictions, in the following few years, at least bandwidth won’t be a bottleneck at all. Internet access? Welcome to the “Wireless Matrix”, in which Neo doesn’t have an Ethernet port!
• If you think WebOS as a complement or a backup of DeskOS (what’s the word again?), it would not need direct controls on the devices. How are you going to change your hard-drive? Buy one from eBay and fill in the address of your WebOS host company?
• Web technology is still in its infant age, people are exploring the capabilities. It’s a bit too early to know what they will be like 5 years later. Before the Windows time, was it really clear what was going to come up and dominate the world? People are exploring, everyone is. Yet once people find out they’ve got enough to start with, backwards compatibility would be considered, or, it may not matter at all!
• As I’ve mentioned above, WebOS, is a good partener of the DeskOS (still cannot remember its original name), not a step son of it. The idea of having a central WebOS, was largely derived from the trend that people are having more than one terminals in their household and are getting frustrated by the complication of synchronizing these dull computers. They are supposed to communicate with their buddies spontaneously, aren’t they? So will less people have multiple PCs at home? No. Then, the need and the market is big.
• It’s evident that WebOS is not powerful in terms of performance. Admittedly, I don’t think installing a game on my WebOS and play the game using the server’s CPU would ever happen. My thought is, the DeskOS (again~) would retain the power to run games, play movies, make graphics and store downloaded data. While WebOS, stores my Calendar, my Address Book, my Notes, my Documents, my Pictures, and my Works etc.; basically things update frequently, containing non-sensitive information if you want.

Since we entered the web2.0 era, sometime in 2006, there are accelerating number of new websites created worldwidely. Have paused reading IT “fashion” blogs for just two weeks, and now I feel like it’s a brand new space. Thousands of applications, with “beta” or not, were being worked out and released to the public, yet I have never heard of them just 2 weeks ago! What an admirable pace of evolution!

So besides many topics being discussed, I just would like to point out one of my brief observations.

Comparing to a few years ago, when everyone kinda wanted to create their own comprehensive websites, now people are getting specialized in their own interests and building helpful tools for either pure interests or profit, but no matter what, it’s a good trend. It might also be an attribute of the so called “web2.0 spirit”, as someone mentioned.

As I was writing this blog, I wrote a bunch of generic functions that I thought are short cuts of the tedious javascript and DOM functions. For example,document.getElementById(), one of the most often used functions, is definitely overwhelming.

Also, there are a lot of incompatible issues from browser to broswer, so there are functions attempting to overcome these and make them transparent, at least to me.

Download Script: (kunalu.js)

I am open to discussions. Many of them are very primative and need improvements. I have only addressed issues in Firefox and IE6+. I did NOT test them in Safari, Mozilla, Netscape, or Opera. Please feel free to leave your comments and suggestions.

I will post some code segment and talk about my initial design ideas.