OMG, Web 2.0 sucks big time! Google, Node.js Knockout, Electric Lazer Commanders, and Seattle.js are rocking my world and pointing the way to Web 3.0!
Today is a great day. You know why? Of course you don’t because you live in a Web 2.0 world. I, however, live in a Web 3.0 world. I live there because it is way cooler than your crappy world. My Interwebz are better than your Internets, and my coders are way cooler than yours. They do magic. Yours just build buttons and fix broken links.
So, what happend today to make my day better than yours? First, there’s this competition, Node.js Knockout. It’s gives you 48 hours to come up with an app, built from scratch on node.js. I have no real idea why node.js is cool, but I do know that the guys using node.js are really cool. There’s still a few days to check it out and vote for your favorites, and there’s plenty to blow your mind.
According to James Pozdena of Electric Lazer Commanders, who built The Spot for the competition, “Node.js a non-blocking event-driven JavaScript library build on top of Google’s V8 engine. Non-blocking means one process can handle multiple requests at once. Most websites are broken out into multiple services (HTTP server, database, file system, etc). Traditional HTTP servers need to wait for other services (like database queries) to be completed before they can send back a response. Non-blocking implementations like node can start handling other requests while it waits for other services to complete for other requests. Non-blocking equals multitasking.”
So, traditionally the Internets have been a pull service. For example, you ask a website for a page and it sends it back. One of the biggest benefits of a non-blocking infrastructure is you can have long polling requests or HTML5 web-sockets. Both technologies let the web server “push” information to the user. This allows the development of chat servers, games, self-updating websites and other “real-time” services.
Other entries worth pursuing on Node.js Knockout are:
Scrabb.ly – Massively multiplayer online scrabble
Piston Hurricane – A multi-player, real-time tower defense game
Drawbridge – Collaborative drawing
This, my friends, is Web 3.0. It’s a whole lotta of real-time interactivity that makes the point and click of today’s Internets look like a game of Canasta in a nursing home.
And it doesn’t just stop there. The Web 3.0 experience is shaping up in other ways, too. Take The Wilderness Downtown project. There’s a whole lotta of cutting edge technology that went into the making of a video for Arcade Fire’s “We Used to Wait.”
Google had a big hand in the project – built entirely with the latest open web technologies, including HTML5 video, audio, and canvas -and it is meant to showcase Chrome, but frankly, it was fine on Firefox when I used it. I gave it my address so that images were rendered on satellite images of my location from Google Maps, and the resulting canopy of choreographed windows, interactive flocking, custom rendered maps, real-time compositing, procedural drawing, and 3D canvas rendering was pretty amazing. God, I hate Flash.
Today, I saw the future of the Web and it was an eye opener. Television is dead, game consoles and proprietary hardware should die; flat websites are destined for the same hell that will some day house AOL.
Check this stuff out, today. I have seen the future, and the future is trippy, man, real gone.
