AOL & Google

Well, it appears to be as official as it possibly can be. According to the Forbes, Google will invest $1 billion in AOL.

In the end, this deal feels like a defensive action on Google's part - they were terrified about what Microsoft could do with AOL and wanted to prevent that at all costs. Its not, immediately, evident to me what they get out of the deal that they didn't have before, with the sole exceptions of linking the Google Talk and AOL IM services and making AOL's video clip library searchable in Google Video. In return they're taking a 5% share of AOL for $1 billion, they'll be providing AOL with search technology (I presume this means that members can search AOL premium content using Google), allowing AOL to sell graphical ads on their system (should be interesting to see how they do this - one of the big boosts of text ads are that they are just that - text ads), and AOL gets some free sponsored links (those are those large text ads that appear above most search results. As a note, they're very expensive - Genesee got quoted tens of thousands of dollars when we looked into the possibility).

Either way, this prevents MSN from merging with AOL into some super-creature that will dominate the internet and take everything over. And the deal isn't certain - the infamous Carl Icahn wants a deal with Microsoft. He also wants AOL split off from Time Warner, so he's not precisely the most liked person. With owning a 3% share comes benefits, though.

Web 2.0 & Firefox

I'm with Joel Spolsky when it comes to the term "Web 2.0". Its yet another meaningless bit of marketing speech that means pretty much whatever the speaker wants it to mean. Blah.

That said, I think its generally regarded that Web 2.0 involves some amount of AJAX. That is, making connections back to the server in the middle of a web page, getting some new data, and dynamically altering the web page based on that new data. GMail uses it, Google Suggest uses it, I'm reasonably sure Google Maps uses it. Its pretty goddamned awesome.

Given all that, I find it very amusing that Mitchell Baker ("chief lizard wranger" of Mozilla) claims that Web 2.0 could have come earlier if it hadn't been for Microsoft's monopoly on the web browser. From the Face Value column of Economist magazine, December 17th, 2005: '"Web 2.0 could have happened a lot earlier, if Microsoft had not had a monopoly for a decade", says Ms. Baker.' (The article is on Economist.com, but you probably need a subscription to see it).

Monopolies are bad. We would have had tabbed browing and blocked pop-ups a lot earlier if it hadn't been for that fact Explorer didn't have any competition for a decade. Not to mention who knows what else - if I could predict innovations, I'd be a lot richer than I am. In the case of AJAX (I'm going to stop calling it Web 2.0 now, before the marketing speak makes me vomit) saying that IE held up the introduction of the technology is a bit full of crap. IE had the ability to make asynchronous connections to a server five years ago. I played with it a bit during my first days at Genesee. Do you know why I put it away? Netscape. Five years ago, you had to support Netscape 4.7 - it just wasn't an option to not do so.

So, really, the reason AJAX got held up is this - Netscape's product was such a piece of crap that the Mozilla team had to throw the source code away and start from scratch. That's why, five years after the fact, we're just now seeing a good product coming from them. Its a pretty awesome product (its my primary browser at this point), but I wish I could have had it five years ago. It would have saved me a ton of figuring out why my HTML didn't work in Netscape - not to even mention the terrible javascript support in 4.7 that kept me from using the technology meaningfully until we drop-kicked Netscape 4.7 support.