Neomeme

Web Worker Daily has an interesting post about how new web services like Amazon S3 are redefining the web development landscape by providing easy-to-use, commoditized web services. Web Worker Daily hails this as a step towards a sunny future where ” a non-programmer with a regular-sized wallet can come up with an idea for a web-based business and put it together himself from pieces available on the web.” Fuck. Can you imagine the cesspool of shit the Web will become if every average Joe thinks himself a web developer? We will be overrun by hundreds, nay thousands of inferior clones, buggy applications and poorly executed concepts. Just look at all of the many hundreds of Digg clones out there. Do 99% of them contribute anything to the Internet community? Do they create any value for users? No, they don’t. We have already glimpsed the sheer horror(warning:don’t click if you have epilepsy) that Myspace created when it convinced average web surfers they were qualified to be web designers. Now imagine, if your mind can handle it, a thousand Gmails, a thousand Wordpresses, a thousand Flickrs, most with that same awful design not only on the frontend but also on the backend. An email service that loses all of your emails because the creator, an average Joe who is completely unfamiliar with the principles of good programming, forgot to drag in the “Backup” widget. Or a web service with broken links not in HTML, as many poorly coded, typo-ridden websites have now, but in relational databases.

Development is not all about writing code. It is about designing solid, scalable and bug-free systems. Joe Nonprogrammer may think that he’s figured out this whole Internets thing because he clicked the “Social Network” button on Amazon, but that will not create a reliable web service, no matter how pretty it looks. Without exception, all of today’s most popular web applications and. Generic, cookie-cutter solutions simply don’t work for anything more than a casual, internal application. A recent example is Shuzak.com, a self-proclaimed social networks for geeks that promtly crashed and stayed down for hours when geeks actually started visiting it. This example is also completely irrelevant, because it did not use Amazon web services or cliche scripts, but the example stands. The amateur developer(s?) created a web application very quickly, but failed to take into account scalability and reliability. Good concept, bad design. Easier to use web development services will trivialize the creation of these types of sites based on nothing more than a good concept, or a clone of a good concept.

I say this, even though I can’t do much more than copy and paste together a few lines of JavaScript, but then again you don’t see me point-and-clicking my way to creating any mashups myself(Any coding I need is outsourced to competent developers).

Our only hope for a relatively clone-free future is that most of these startups pop up and disappear without making much, or any of a splash. There can only be so many social Web 2.0 sites in any given niche, and the established players do a very good job of protecting their turf from interlopers, particularly unoriginal ones. The current crop of Web 2.0 leaders is based not only a good concept, but good implementation. All of the brilliant developers are working at Google, not clicking around EZ Web Service Creator Shareware No Computer Experience Needed Make The Next Google 2.0 Beta. Let’s leave the development of web services to them.

I am not saying that innovation from small players is a bad thing. On the contrary, it is small innovators that have shaped the current Web 2.0 landscape. But, to reiterate, all of those services had talented developers who built innovative, creative solutions from scratch. Point-and-click web application development inhenerently constrains the developer to very specific, trite design(Oooh another Google Maps mashup!). A succesful web application requires effort and innovation- not a few clicks at the McDonalds of web development. I know we con’t stop the eventual commoditization and simplification of web service development. I just hope that Goth chick from Myspace with 10 Youtube videos starting simultaneously on her profile doesn’t decide to try her hand at making the next Google.