Web 2.0: A serious case of diarRIA.
We’ve all heard of the whole “Web 2.0″ phenomenon that has gripped the Internet for the past little while. One of the major outcomes has been the widespread use of so-called “Rich Internet Applications“. These remotely-hosted applications, accessible through a modern Web browser, are claimed to be suitable replacements for existing applications. This is not the case, of course. And to show how it can be very dangerous to depend on these applications, I’d like to recount some events I witnessed several days ago.
Myself and several colleagues were at a meeting with a client, along with some of the other consultants working for the client. Unfortunately, at the client’s location all we could get was a rather slow wireless connection. This wasn’t a problem for us; we had brought our data along with us on our laptops. But one of the consultants had chosen, for whatever reason, to use one of those Web 2.0 scheduling applications.
To keep the story short, that Web 2.0 site just wouldn’t work over the slow connection. The consultant kept getting timeouts. Eventually he did make some progress getting to the scheduling page for the day in question. But it took about three to four minutes to get there. Meanwhile, this got the client extremely angry. They were not amused by their time being wasted for such a simple task.
One of the client’s reps, an older gentleman, asked what the problem was. The consultant said something like, “My RIA scheduling app isn’t working.” To this the client’s rep handed the consultant a pad of paper and a pen, and replied, “Your diarRIA has wasted enough of our time. Write down the details on paper.”
The term “diaRIA”, pronounced like “diarrhea”, perfectly sums up my experience with most Web 2.0-based applications. They are little but a productivity malady, and I do hope that they are just a fad that will soon pass. Meanwhile, those of us who need to access our applications remotely will just use X or VNC.