Musings on the Instant Web

The Internet is evolving ever so quickly, and more and more people and businesses are feeling the need to have a presence over the Internet. Increasingly such needs are fulfilled through 'instant' and low-cost solutions such as posting on blogging or social networking sites, or using web widgets to enhance an existing website. While this has helped to make it easier to maintain a web presence, it is nonetheless still not an easy task. In particular for average people and small businesses who have little money or technical skills, there are constant challenges such as 'how do I do this or that my blogging site or website does not support', hopefully for free and dummy-proof too.

There was a time when adding up a larger table of numbers means that you will need to have a programmer at your disposal. It was expensive and took a while to do. And then the spreadsheet was invented, and its ease-of-use empowers average people to do more with less, which then created a revolution in personal computing. I believe that when it comes to maintaining a web presence we are still at the pre-spreadsheet era (so to speak). What we need are flexible web technologies that not only meet the many different needs of average people, but just like the spreadsheet also empower the average people to achieve what they need to do easily, quickly, and at low cost.

So here are my musings on where the Internet is heading, and also the solutions that are (or will be) available to the average people.