overstimulate

Paolo wrote the other day about building a web based office environment based on ajax. On the sourceforge for ajaxoffice, the gem appears:

So I guess we just need Google (or Yahoo!) to provide the service and the possibility to store files on their disks.

That, my friend, is what everyone wants right now. Web 2.0 needs Data 2.0! A del.icio.us for files.

What we need is an Atom Store. You get an Atom Store when you combine OpenSearch, Atom (with its protocols), and a good database (good seems to require simple, fast, scalable).

• Mark Pilgrim's magicline and monkey do could use it to store data
• Rohit Khare & Ben Sittler at Commerce.net have been working on requirements of an Atom Store.
• Joe Gregorios, author of Atom Publishin Protocol, is researching it.
• You can even hear Google's Adam Bosworth request it on IT Conversations, hoping MySQL folks don't become Oracle as Oracle doesn't scale the way an Atom Store could scale.

Responses to "AjaxOffice"

1. Sat, 27 Aug 2005 Steve Mallett says:
   I'm actually working on a "delicious for files". We've built a rough sketch of how it will work. We started with adding the bookmarks thing, and included an rss reader so there's more to store than just your own files... like stuff others are sharing that you'd like to store aswell. We're looking for some funding ATM to get some servers for storage which will have to fund itself. I don't forsee Google or yahoo just giving away a ton of storage space without a reason to visit all the time. You can take a peek at the skeleton if you like, but there's actually no file storage yet (which is a bit beside the purpose ATM, I know): http://dev.twaggle.com The idea of an online office suite is neat, but it's taken forever for desktop client apps to become stable. I don't think I'd write my thesis or critical office presentation with an online app yet. I'd write that locally then upload it to my file/bookmark sharing group.
2. Sat, 27 Aug 2005 Danny says:
   I'd be interesting in hearing what advantages you see in an Atom store compared to existing formats/protocols/stores. People are already pushing around mildy-metadata stamped content files with HTTP. I listened to the Bosworth presentation, I thought a lot of the requirements he pointed out made sense. Only I can't see Atom fulfilling them (in itself) because it's still not really open data (as in open book). The main content payload is still opaque as any arbitrary format - you need additional facilities to interpret it. We'd still effectively have a Web of documents rather than a Web of data. Coming at it from a different angle, I do think the kind of possibilities Bosworth and other imagine are available using Semantic Web technologies, with possibly a little more work on protocols (and a lot more on implementation and deployment). In that scenario the data isn't opaque, there's a shared data model. For the browser based apps there's already some implementation - probably the neatest are PiggyBank and Semantic Bank. But as it happens I think there's a lot of potential where the two approaches intersect. RDF stores offer a way of flexibly storing and processing the data, APP can offer good ways of passing it around.
3. Mon, 29 Aug 2005 Sam Schillace says:
   We've been playing with this idea as well...here's the Word part of office on the web already: www.writely.com. A central store would be nice, but that doesn't seem very much in keeping with the spirit of the web. What if someone had proposed a central server for all the web pages in the world, circa 1999? It would be totally unworkable. Better, I think, is to make apps like this be able to communicate with each other. We haven't gotten there yet, but we're about to support ATOM for writely - so you can push and pull data in and out of it.
4. Mon, 29 Aug 2005 Jesse Andrews says:
   Just to clarify, I don't mean there is one centralized store, just that there exists software which can act like an information store. Users may run their own, or use a service provided by a community/company (just as email was done originally).
5. Mon, 29 Aug 2005 Alexander Muse says:
   So, a bittorrent as a shared drive...
6. Tue, 30 Aug 2005 karl says:
   Hmm trying to understand the concepts. I'm not willing to share my files online and to add another brick in the privacy breach that we are creating every day. There's something very interesting with the notion of Trust. Could you give more details about the way it should work? There's already Google swallowing our data without PGP. Are we ready to share the rest of it to one or even 10 companies in the world?

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