Wired on Friday:Websites may have had stupid names in the old days but at least they had big ambitions. Yahoo! was about categorising all of the net; Google wanted to index it all, writes Danny O'Brien.
The latest top hit in Silicon Valley is Twitter, a site that forwards your casual messages to a pool of your friend's instant messenger clients and mobile phone's SMS inbox. Another site called Doxory lets you put up a tough decision, and have your friends vote on what you should do. It's the internet equivalent of taking a vote in the pub.
Another service, called checkli.st, is devoted to managing shopping and travel checklists.
Where are the sky-high goals? Is this progress? Actually, I'd say it was. I think these mini-sites represent an important new expansion in the range of the net, made possible by straightforward software.
These days, simple but dynamic applications are becoming as easy to create as old static websites were in the past. When one coder with spare time can create a site like Doxory, other companies that don't necessarily plan to build a business around their crazy web ideas can still execute those ideas and put them online in a few hours, and with very little development cost.
The software that makes this possible are the new generation of "web frameworks". One is Ruby on Rails, which this column has covered before. But a better example in the world of making existing companies and websites more powerful is a framework called Django.
Django, like Ruby on Rails, was created as a spin-off from an existing website, and given away free by its parent company. In the case of Ruby on Rails, the company was involved in web development: Django, however, came from the world of newspaper journalism.
The Lawrence Journal-World is a newspaper group based in the small city of Lawrence, Kansas (population 80,000). The newspaper is privately owned and has a century-long tradition of innovation.
When the internet first appeared, it employed a group of coders to help bring the business into the digital era. The coders wrote Django and used it to create, as they say, "software development on journalist deadlines".
Most newspapers are happy to put up their current content, with perhaps some recent archives. Django let the Lawrence Journal-World create mini-websites to accompany newspaper sections, or even individual stories.
Web frameworks make stitching together a database, user input and static web pages easier. So, for instance, the Lawrence Journal-World was able to take its existing events database and turn it into an event listing site, together with user comments and local colour. When an editor decided he wanted to spice up the off-season sports pages, the team was able to create a school baseball league mini-site, which gave the same set of profiles, statistics crunching and trivia for young kids' sports leagues, as major sports sites give to the professionals.
Django's use has now spread to bigger papers, like the Washington Post, where it is used for similar purposes. Visit the Washington Post's coverage of the Iraq war, for instance, and you'll find a database of all 3,000-plus US fatalities in the war, together with a picture and bio if available. You can examine the data from a number of different angles: which parts of the country are suffering the most; what the ages of the deceased are, who the latest victims are.
While it would have been possible for a professional web development house to put something like this together as a special project for a newspaper before, the idea that a company could do this as a sideline to their regular business without devoting a sizeable chunk of the budget would be unheard of.
It's this kind of additional, data-driven insight that is to the web what powerful graphics or video stories are to traditional newspapers or TV shows.
To create such sites still needs programming, but far less than it used to. Sites that would have required a database engineer, a web designer and someone to write the glue to connect those two worlds together can now be done with a single coder working with an established website's pre-existing design.
You don't need a newspaper to drive one of these mini-sites. One of Django's co-developers created a site for his hometown of Chicago that plots and analyses crime from the incident data published by the Chicago police department. Rather than a dry set of data, ChicagoCrime.org takes the data and presents it on zoomable maps. Indeed, some sites that have been created with Ruby on Rails and Django have been made by individuals who don't claim to be programmers and some of those are the "trivial" sites you see popping up on the web now.
These are barely standalone sites, but they're an amazing advance when embedded in other sites.
It's taken us a long time to realise that the real medium of the internet isn't text and jpegs, but code. And it's taken even longer to appreciate that the ability to create these applications has been within the reach of companies that aren't in the web business themselves.
But now that it has, we're going to see far more trivial applications online - and far better sites for companies that never saw the need for specialised web development.
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