Ajax saved my life!

13th September 2006, Ajax, Other, Trends

Now, I’m enjoying emerging trends of the web as much as the next coder out there, but this morning something really got on my nerves. It was on the BBC breakfast, they’re basically taking a cutting edge internet theme each morning for 10 minutes and explaining it out in a non web-savvy manner for their audience. This, in general, I think is a good thing. There I am thinking my Dad could do with watching it.

Problem is they had an American Internet Entrepreneur on today. First thing that came out of his mouth? “Exciting things are happening everywhere - Ajax is a great new component that makes things like mySpace possible, they wouldn’t exist without it.”

Now I may be paraphrasing him, but what a tool. Don’t hyperbole when the target audience just wants a basic understanding. And his statement was simply untrue.

mySpace would exist without Ajax and Ajax isn’t new. But I’m not going there as that’s been done to death on the web. What I will go onto though is their second little ditty on the web. They showed a band publishing four tracks on mySpace and banging on about how great it is. Ok, yeah good for them, but they could do that without mySpace and no-one is highlighting the copyright laws that I’ve gone over before.

Does the BBC not talk with Backstage? I’m sure the guys there would liked to have gone over the agenda for this programme and would probably have highlighted these gripes. Perhaps not though, as Backstage seems to have petered out into a bunch of feeds and not much else, but that’s for another day.