Funny, just when I get One Thing New looking great, I decide to close up shop. Well, I’m not leaving blogging all together. But I’ve been thinking about my goals recently, and being a professional blogger isn’t very high on the list.

Turns out my highest goal is to take my part time freelance Web development and see if I can’t make a go of it full time. To that end, I’m going to consolidate the Rob Lindsey brand and focus on my Web presence over at RobLindsey.com.

Yeah, I just redesigned that site, too. But I’m going to change it up again. The main page will be a blog, which will deal with a lot of the topics that have popped up here. And you’ll be able to find out about my services and other pursuits on the sub pages.

For better or worse, I’ve got the blogging bug. So, instead of trying to become a blogger, I’m going to focus on becoming a developer who has a blog. There’s a difference. Anyway, thanks to all who have read and commented on this blog in the last three plus months. It’s been a lot of fun, and I hope you’ll come over to RobLindsey.com and check it out when I get up and running.

With Adobe’s announcement today that they’re opening up the source of their Flex SDK under the Mozilla GPL, they’ve gained a little more ground in the burgeoning competition between rich Internet application runtime environments. While I’m still learning about all this new technology, I’m starting to get the feeling that the “Browser Wars” are history and the “Runtime Wars” are just getting started.

There are some heavy hitters in the tech industry spending a lot of time on these new runtime environments. Microsoft has just announced Silverlight. Mozilla is incorporating offline capabilities into the upcoming Firefox 3 release. And of course, you’ve got Adobe Apollo. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, which I’m currently learning about. But all of them will be players in the next phase of the Web, when rich Internet apps take center stage.

The browser model is on its way out, with the burden of processing headed client-side. It will probably take a couple of years to get there, but I think that’s the direction we’re headed. Check back here for news and thoughts about the revolution.

After a couple pretty long posts, I’m taking it easy tonight with the first One Thing New Web 2.0 Linkfest. These are links to some interesting stories I’ve come across in the last few days.

• Bokardo posted a great response / analysis of the report in The Economist magazine claiming that traffic to social networking sites will outstrip traffic to porn sites. If that happens, it will be the first time that porn on the Web has fallen to #2 behind anything.
• Apparently at last weeks Web 2.0 Expo, Google might have tipped off some of their future plans in a survey they gave to their Google Apps Premier users. Web Worker Daily discusses this and predicts eight Google Apps in our future. I know folks already use Gmail for storage, but a Google online backup app would be awesome.
• A friend of mine who has very solid traffic on his Blogspot blog is going to be switching to stand alone hosting sometime in the next couple of weeks. Darren at Problogger.net posted an “open mic” about hosted versus stand alone blogging. Problogger is a great resource for bloggers of all kinds, but he has some particularly awesome posts about this topic.
• I was searching Technorati for some good posts about writing and found a great guide to writing for the Web. Writing for the Web is just as much about organization and marketing as it is about good grammar, and Kevin sums it up very well in his article.
• Finally, Wired magazine’s story about the lamest technology mascots will remind you why you hated Clippy so much.

In my Grab Bag the other day, I wrote a blurb about the launch of Adobe Apollo. At the time, I was excited about it because everyone else was, but since then, I’ve done some homework to see what all the hubbub was about. Turns out, unlike your typical over-hyped new Web technology (I’m looking at you twitter), Apollo could actually be something. Maybe — dare I say it? — the Next Big Thing.

So what is Apollo? Here’s how Adobe describes it:

Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) to the desktop.

That’s a mouthful, but what does it all mean? An analogy: Apollo is like a CD player and Apollo apps are like CDs. By itself, a CD player doesn’t do much but wait around to play CDs. And the opposite is true. But together, they make music. So when you download Apollo, it’s not going to do anything but wait on your computer to run Apollo apps.

There are other runtimes: most notably the Java runtime, which you’ve probably run across if you’ve spent any time on the Web. Apollo is the same thing, but there’s an important difference that sets it apart. Instead of having to take night courses to learn Java so you can program Java apps, Apollo lets you use all of Web development skill you already know to design applications.

I look at Apollo like a Web browser without the “browse.” Browsers already run applications. You go to check your Gmail; you’re running an application. Well, you’re not running it. It’s running on a server somewhere. With Apollo, the application will run on your desktop, which accomplishes two things: it takes some of the load off the server and it lets the user work offline.

It’s this second feature that the development community is salivating over. Compose emails, set up eBay auctions, fill in your calendar, change your lineup in your fantasy baseball league. You can do all of this offline (say, on an airplane or if your cable goes out) and once you’re back on the grid, sync up to the server with one click, implementing all of the actions you’ve completed on your desktop. Applications with hybrid functionality like that are called Rich Internet Applications (RIA), and a lot of people think they might be what becomes Web 3.0.

Pretty cool, right? But before we jump in with both feet, there are a couple of caveats before anointing Apollo Next Big Thing status.

1. Security
   Every new technology that has come along in the Internet age has gone through some growing pains while the kinks in security are worked out. I can’t see Apollo being any different. The runtime is designed for Web developers to leverage their existing skill sets to develop applications. Well, hackers have those same, if not more advanced, skill sets. Just something to think about.
2. Compatability
   The runtime is cross-platform, but does that mean the applications will be? I did some looking for early Apollo apps, and I found an Apollo music player. I’m not sure which platform the developer used to create it, but it wouldn’t run on my Mac. Whether that’s an issue with the runtime or with his app remains to be seen, but still, it wouldn’t run.
3. Efficiency
   The other major Web-related runtime is Java, and anyone who’s used a Java app knows that the runtime is pretty cumbersome. You have to wait a while for Java to launch, and then you have to wait for the app to initialize. It takes longer than it should. While all the sample apps I’ve tried for Apollo have been very quick, they’ve also been pretty simple. When developers start adding deeper functionality and more complex interfaces, will Apollo bog down, too?

That said, I really believe the Apollo project has way more upside than downside. If you think you’ve seen a lot of Web-based innovation in the last couple of years, I have a feeling Apollo is going to bring it to your desktop.

Something I’ve been reading a lot about recently is the idea of social network aggregators. Similar in concept to news and blog aggregators, these apps allow users to manage their various social networking accounts in one place. On the surface, this seems like a great solution for someone who maintains an active Web presence spread across multiple networks. But if you dig a little deeper, you realize that it might not be that simple.

ag·gre·gate (ăg’rĭ-gĭt)
n.
1. A total considered with reference to its constituent parts; a gross amount: “An empire is the aggregate of many states under one common head” (Edmund Burke).
v. tr.
1. To gather into a mass, sum, or whole.

I keep profiles on MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, YouTube, and, more recently, Bebo, LinkedIn, and aNobii: all social networks. And I have to admit, it’s a pain to keep up with seven different user names and passwords. How simple it would be to have one place to log in where I could check up on all my networks. But there are a couple of problems.

1. Diluting the Experience
   When you remove yourself from the individual interfaces of each service, you run the risk of removing yourself from participation. Your social network aggregator will homogenize your experience and become just another news reader. Instead of reading the news of the world, you’ll be reading the news of your friends, without adding to the conversation.
2. Crossing the Streams
   Say you’ve got a music profile on MySpace, a business profile on LinkedIn, and a personal profile on Facebook. These are three distinct aspects of your personality that you probably don’t want to mix. Or at the very least, you’d like to keep your business life separate. If all of your social networks are aggregated, a prospective employer or a fan of your music might be turned off by something they find there. There’s something to be said about segregating the various aspects of your life.
3. Who Aggregates the Aggregators?
   What is MySpace? It’s an aggregator. You can have your music, your blog, your photos, and your friends all under the same umbrella. And the killer function of MySpace is the ability to share all your cool stuff with your friends. If you use a platform like Spokeo to manage your social networking accounts, chances are you’ll have something cool on Friendster you want to share with your MySpace buddy. So you invite him to join Spokeo, and then you’ve turned your aggregator into a social network. Since there will never be a universal social networking platform (some like MySpace, some like Facebook, etc.), the impulse to bring them all to one interface is misguided. You’ll just keep creating networks once removed and on and on down the slippery slope.

What I’m saying is, the dynamic, participatory nature of social networks precludes easy aggregation. So with all these conversations at our fingertips, what can we do to help organize it all? Start with your browser.

My browser of choice is Firefox, and I have my bookmark toolbar set up with a “Daily Stops” folder with links to all of my networks. Firefox will also manage my various passwords, taking that hassle out of my hands. So checking in on each profile is as simple as clicking seven links. It’s pretty easy.

Every developer in the world has their eyes peeled for the Next Big Thing, and some think that social network aggregation is where it’s at. But even though it looks great on paper, doesn’t mean that it’s a great idea.