AJAX applications will remain unworthy of serious business (at least for risk-conscious people).

This is quite a bold statement, especially considering the source: The Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS), a prestigious academic institution. The author is Pascal Meunier whose current hobby is fighting all client-side scripting technologies, especially AJAX.

CERIAS has certainly some excellent thinkers when it comes to security, but in this case we respectfully disagree. Yes, there are security problems with browsers and web applications, but there are security problems with regular client software too. This fact has never prevented anybody (especially the risk-conscious people) from evaluating all the solutions available and selecting the ones with a better security architecture.

In his blog post, professor Meunier says there is problem with “same origin policy” and shared servers and he proves it by adding some nasty links from his Purdue homepage to the homepage of another collegue. True, but I cannot see how this could affect the happy users of so many well-designed web 2.0 applications. Then he signals that browsers can be made unusable by visiting pages with malicious Javascript. But this is old story: do you remember the funny sites with never ending loops of dialog boxes? Then he moves to analyze other vulnerabilities, but again I could see very weak relations with the present web 2.0 environment.

I can’t tell if these “Ajax horror stories” are episodic or endemic, but I believe that serious Ajax developers won’t cause any more harm than those working with a different software paradigm.

Gmail, the poster child of Ajax applications, is perfect for serious businesses. Combine it with Freenigma and you realize the security dream of any sysadmin: a robust mail service accessible from the Internet, with a very good spam filter, strong encryption and generous mailboxes. And please note that without the revolutionary Ajax interface there would be no chance to win user acceptance and the dream would vanish!

(Very good products like IMP and SquirrelMail never took off because corporate employees were reluctant to abandon the sleek and fast interface of traditional mail clients such as Outlook.)

Aaron Levie invited Clipperz to an early preview of a revamped version of Box.net, an online storage service. I played with the new Box.net for a couple of days and the overall impression is quite positive. I’m happy they dropped all the references to “documents”, “music” and “photos” from the menus, it was just confusing and added nothing to the functionalities.

Thanks to Richard MacManus and his review of the best web office products, I’ve discovered iRows. I have to say I like it more than NumSum. The overall user experience is much more pleasant and smooth. Moving between cells, inserting formulas, selecting a range of cells is incredibly easy.

Everybody was expecting them and here they are: rumors of Google acquiring Riya. It can certainly be a sensible acquisition from Google point of view, but I’m not convinced that this is the best option for little Riya.

They do have a real product and they can have several real business models. They can sell subscriptions to their photo hosting service, they can integrate the proprietary facial recognition system with third party platforms, they can exploit their unique tag space, …

Furthermore digital image processing is a relatively old field, but only recently the explosion of digital cameras created the ground for new markets. Spotting the faces of your friends and relatives is certainly a nice application, but smart people at Riya could certainly figure out other services in different areas both for individuals and companies.

Munjal, Tara,
40 millions are a lot of money, but are you sure you want to become the new Blogger? You have higher expectations than that, don’t you?

Maybe, I’m just plain naive but I thought that one of the Web 2.0 characteristics was innovation flowing from small companies and not big corporation. As usual, you say? Yes, true, but this time the small companies have more chances to survive and stay small and healthy thanks to the connected fabric of the Web 2.0.

“Architecture of participation” is beautiful definition of the Web 2.0 from Tim O’Reilly, but it should apply to users and companies as well. If Web 2.0 collapse to fit into the GYM (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) how much space is being left for participation?

Tagalag launched months ago without creating too much hype. No top bloggers talked about Tagalag and this fact corroborated my good feeling about the different spirit of web 2.0: pragmatic, focused on solving real problems and enhancing the online experience.

Tagalag is a funny project without strong technological assets and without a viable business model. Since you can tag everything, you could also tag people (actually their email addresses) and this appears to be the only rationale behind Tagalag.

On my opinion Tagalag deserved the silence it got.

But Today Michael Arrington posted about Tagalag in his TechCrunch weblog. And this is a bad sign. Michael is doing a great job mapping what is valuable in the web 2.0 world. His company and product reviews are always an interesting reading. But if a smart and well connected entrepreneur like Michael puts hype on projects and companies like Tagalag, I start smelling bubble …

What was a budding movement three years ago, at the dawn of the revival in technology, internet, and silicon valley, has become a full blown mania.

[From Fred Wilson.]

While there are numerous efforts to launch web based MS Word replacements, it seems that MS Excel risks no real competition from Web 2.0.

This sounds strange because in the past spreadsheets have always played a key role in determining the success of new technologies. It was Dan Bricklin with his VisiCalc to move accountants and analysts from mainframes to personal computers. For many of them the appearance of Mitch Kapor’s brainchild Lotus 123 was the main reason to migrate from Apple II to the IBM PC world. Later on, Excel was one of the best justifications to graphical interfaces, i.e. to operating systems with pull down menus and a point and click capability using a mouse as pointing device.

NumSum by TrimPath is today the only project in this arena. It just mimics Excel’s basic functionalities and adds a “social” flavour with the introduction of tags and easy spreadsheet embedding in weblogs.

What I’d really like to see is a nice Ajax application that overcomes the two big issues that makes me uncomfortable with Excel.

• my spreadsheet are not ubiquitous
• the present spreadsheet paradigm is bad

The first point is quite self explanatory. The second refers to the awful way of mixing data structure, formulas and presentations. Excel and the OpenOffice clone did nothing to keep them apart. To change one of this three components you need to rebuild the entire spreadsheet.

Quantrix Modeler is a very nice and professional solution that embraces a new and sound paradigm, a paradigm that solve Excel inconsistencies. It doesn’t come cheap though. Flexisheet has an identycal approach, it’s open source but just for Mac OS X and it seems it will never get out of Beta.

I see a lot of space here for real Web 2.0 companies and VCs. It’s not as quick and easy as building an online to-do manager, but it could be a huge win. Move fast before big players enter this market. The more likely to launch are those that already owns a lot of the customer’s data: Salesforce.com is the first I could think of. It would be very easy for Marc Menioff to offer an Excel replacement to play with sales, invoicing and accounting data. Unless Google decides otherwise, see here and here.

What will Microsoft do to counter this trend? I agree with Paul Graham, when in Hackers & Painters he wrote

I expect Microsoft will develop some kind of server/desktop hybrid, where the operating system works together with servers they control. […] I don’t expect Microsoft to all the way to the extreme of doing the computations on the server, with only a browser for the client, if they can avoid it.

Recent news and comments seems to confirm this strategy.

PS: Of course the ability to import Excel file could be a nice feature for any “good enough” Web 2.0 solution, as it was for Excel the ability to read Lotus 123 files.