Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

ff2003: watching the alpha geeks

current session: “Watching the Alpha Geeks,” presented by Tim O’Reilly of oreilly.com.

A big part of what we do at O’Reilly is watch how hackers are using technology, since people who can make computers do what they want without waiting on vendors show us a lot about the shape of things to come. Right now, one of the things the alpha geeks are showing me is the deconstruction of the browser paradigm, and the development of new applications that use web services for the back end, and rich client semantics for the front end. Macromedia has been preaching this gospel under the name “Rich Internet Applications.” I’m here to tell you why I believe they are onto the next big thing.

This morning session was unique out of most of the sessions offered here in that O’Reilly had very little specific to say about Flash. His theme was more of a grand-scale vision of where the industry is headed, and how we, as members of this developer community, play an important role in determining its direction.

“Everyone in the computer industry has to think very hard about where we’re going, and not just where we’ve been … the future of computing.”

This notion of taking responsibility for the outcomes produced by the technology you create is very reminiscent of a class I took at Georgetown last semester.

O’Reilly quoted Ray Kurzweil (author of “The Age of Spritual Machines,” among other things) and William Gibson (author of “Neuromancer,” among other things).

“The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.”

- William Gibson

To O’Reilly, the “alpha geeks” are the folks who are just a little ahead of the power curve, innovating and experimenting, moving things along faster than the big companies alone would.

O’Reilly offered this schema of the techology evolution:

He described the current “paradigm shift” has been the development of web services. All of the killer apps of the past few years have been network related, he said. But we’re still fixated on desktop applications, trying to make the new things too much like what came before.

“Software created above the level of a single device”

O’Reilly cited Macromedia Central as an example of paradigm shift thinking. The new application, he said, moves beyond simple client/server relationships. Different things happen depending on the user’s level of connectedness, and there is coordination between multiple systems and data sources at the application level, not totally reliant on the server.

He said that MC is a significant move, in that it allows Flash to move into the mainstream as a high end application — useful and powerful, as well as cool. Flash frontends, using a variety of component web services (“small pieces loosely joined”) as the backends, can be as dynamic as full-fledged desktop applications.

In arguing for an open-source future, O’Reilly echoed the “architecture is politics” argument of Lawrence Lessig in “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace.” He urged Macromedia and the developer community to make it easier for others to develop on top of their own work (i.e. how “view source” helped people learn HTML and scripting tricks from each other) — “leapfrogging” (building atop what’s been done before) vs. “sumo wrestling” (proprietary attempts at one-upsmanship).

In closing, he urged developers to create and share projects that could be extensibile and interoperable.

Think network. Think open. Play well with others, and have fun.”