There is a lot of excitement/noise/fud/heat about Web 2.0 and RIA these days.

Life on the web used to be simple. (Order of events that follows is probably incorrect).

There was HTML. HTML was good. Web browsers on may different platforms (Un*x, Windows, Mac, VMS, etc) could display the information.

Then (a long time ago) someone added forms capability to HTML - this meant that you could interact with a web site and send it data. HTML became standardised - it wasn’t owned by any particular profit making organisation. Anyone could use it.

Then someone added Applets - little applications that could run inside your web browser. These were slow and required proprietary software (now open source), but the software was free and could run on lots of different platforms.

Then someone added security - your communication with the web server could be encrypted. E-commerce was born.

Then someone re-invented Applets and called them ActiveX. These required propriety software and only really worked on the Windows platform.

Then someone added Javascript allowing simple programs to be embedded in web pages. This because a standard and was called ECMAscript. It could run on lots of platforms.

Then someone invented style sheets. HTML got more complicated, but could do more and looked prettier and still could run on lots of platforms.

Then someone invented XML and XSLT - allowing data to be represented as structured text and viewed in different ways. Things started to get more complicated, but sill was free to run on lots of platforms.

Then someone allowed Javascript to make asynchronous calls back to the web server. AJAX was born, and so was Web 2.0 and RIA (Rich Internet Applications).

Then people saw dollar signs and threw away standards that run on lots of platforms, and now we have three competing technologies to take Web 2.0 on to the next level:

• Microsoft’s Silverlight - runs on Windows and Mac
• Adobe’s Flash/Flex - mixture of proprietary and open source, runs on lots of platforms
• Sun’s JavaFX - open source and runs of lots of platforms, including mobile phones

It looks like the web is no longer going to be based on standards, but on competing proprietary technologies.

Time will tell where we end up. I expect eventually someone will see how complex things have got and re-invent the wheel HTML claiming it to be a great new idea.

I’ve recently been using Google’s ability to produce your own custom homepage.

This has been wonderful. I’ve been able to add my calendar, my email, my subscribed RSS feeds with Google reader, and lots of other useful tools such as notes, to-do lists, etc. I have a common home page that I can use from both work and home that contains the up-to-date information that I want.

Or so I thought….

Somewhere around lunchtime today it all went pear shaped. The homepage reverted back to some version that I had played with a few months ago. Gone was all the useful information.

Thinking that I had done something stupid, or that there was a bug in our web filtering proxy (that the company I work for makes), I spent ages trying different things: checking with IE and Firefox, clearing out old cookies, do network traces.

Luckily I stumbled across a post in Google groups suggesting that I was not alone. It seems that a lot of people have experienced the same problem today. The sad thing is that Google (who generally are thought of as “good guys”) have not said a word - no explanation, apology, warning or help on the homepage as far as I can see.

Are we becoming too reliant on these “free” services? How much damage does an insident like this do to our confidence or Google’s reputation? What are the alternatives?

In my hunt for a solution I’ve come across Netvibes. But can I rely on this any more (or less) than Google?

Update: 27th April 2007:  It seems Google is now fixed with no explanation of what went wrong.