Web-Hide and Web Frameworks

The always awesome termie recently coined the term web-hide to describe "a resistance to new web service hype built up from involvement in the industry or with its members." (link) I still read del.icio.us/popular and programming.reddit.com daily to keep up with what is happening on the web. Lately I've been frustrated after seeing a parade of web apps featured. Was it jealously? indifference? No it was web-hide.

Adding to this sense of resistance, is a growing dissatisfaction with the whole state of web apps in general (although not in the way you might expect.) If you want to use a web app you have two choices:

Use a 3rd parties web app
Run your own open source web app

There are times when using a 3rd party service doesn't cut it (either privacy of data, longevity concerns about host, not a perfect fit, ...) and for those times you are forced to configure your own. This severely limits the audience that can install and run these apps. While my mom may install picassa on her computer she isn't going to setup and run wordpress or gallery or any other web app (as nice as rails is I doubt she would install those either.) I'm a supporter of open source, but I'm pragmatic about it. Currently to run your own web apps suck for almost every user. So open source web apps are secondary citizens. There are individual beacons of light where there is moderate usage by every day people, but I would posit that the number of individual installs are far smaller than the 500,000 wordpress blogs hosted on wordpress.com.

Just as rails (and modern programming languages) can make huge improvements productivity by not trying to solve everyone's problems (complicated databases, pointers, ...), perhaps we can build a framework that makes the processes easier to install, use and modify some types of open source web apps. hmm...

Responses to "Web-Hide and Web Frameworks"

Mon, 11 Dec 2006 Chris Messina says:
So... how is this different than, say, what Ning is trying to do? And what parts of web services/open source need to be made easier for the lay audience who perhaps aren't terribly familiar with these things? I agree that these things should be made better, and like you, I'm pragmatic about open source -- which is why I championed Mozilla to consider this route, not because of the laddie-dah cum-bah-ya ethos of open source (which I think is actually not at all cum bah ya) but because, as you said, pragmatically it helps people get to solutions that help them much sooner than proprietary systems who can't take their own economic value into consideration when designing or adding features. Why do Microsoft products suck? Because they are beholden to mega-corporations' interests that demand more features instead of focusing on the elegance of implementation. TextMate is a pretty good example of focus and of opening the right parts of the "engine" to allow for customization and modification. Userscripts and userstyles also follow this model. We should talk more about my Greasekit idea as I think we're headed in similar directions...