Web 2.0 sites - painfully, agonizingly slow

I will point a finger (actually two) straight away: Squidoo and Feedburner. These typical Web 2.0, AJAXy sites are agonizingly, painfully slow! I have nothing against them, in fact I use both of them a lot, but their grinding, ponderous, slothfulness drives me crazy!

I am one of these people who opens 37 tabs in Firefox and another 43 different programs in Windows, so I can see how I might be contributing to this. Not to mention that my old 512Mb RAM, 1800Mhz AMD system is getting a bit long in the tooth. But the fact remains that I dread the moment when I have to switch from one active tab in Firefox to another where I have one of the aforementioned sites open (like I did just now whilst writing this post, to copy/paste the url's of the two sites). It can sometimes take up 10 seconds for the tab to activate, or the page to render, or whatever the heck it is doing!

Sure there are other factors involved here, sure it may be unfair to single out these two sites - I just happen to use them a lot, and others, Flickr and YouTube, say, seem to work quicker - but the fact remains that on a consistent basis I spend way longer waiting to open Squidoo (never mind trying to edit anything!) than any other site!

If that's Web 2.0, then it is obviously not for the chronically impatient like me... Roll on Web 4.0!

Digital photography will eat itself!

According to data from IDC published in ZDnet's blog, almost 30 million digital cameras were sold in the US alone in 2006. Future-Phobia confidently predicts that this massive market penetration of digital cameras will eventually result in a similar effect to the "pop will eat itself" and "net advertising will eat itself" effects and an uneasy equilibrium will soon be reached, if indeed there is not a major downturn in digital camera sales.

The theory is straightforward: as more and more people buy digital cameras, and upload digital photographs onto the net, slowly but surely everything and everyone in the world will have been photographed at some point. Thus at some point it will become superfluous to take pictures, say like I did last weekend in the mountains in Serbia, because there are already so many photos, even of these relatively unknown mountains, that there is no point in photographing them, I might just as well have downloaded them from the web. In fact, there is not much point even in downloading them, just save a link somewhere so you can see where you were.

Imagine the situation with a popular spot, like the Eiffel Tower in Paris! Think how many photos there are on the net of that scene! What is the point of photographing that again!?

No, a time is soon to be upon us, when everything worth photographing will have been photographed, and the bottom will fall out of the vastly overinflated market for digital cameras!

But I must be off, I think there is a small corner of my balcony that I had clean forgotten to photograph...