Some thoughts on Ajax

If you haven't already seen it, go read Jesse's new essay on Ajax, or Asynchronous Javascript and XML web applications. Since I'll be talking about related topics at the IA Summit, I thought I'd throw out a few of my initial thoughts:

• Brokenatedness of the page model. Don't throw away your visual vocabulary stencil yet, but interaction design for web apps is getting a lot harder. There's no clear and simple shorthand for describing flow within and between pages.
• RIAs. I haven't followed the IxD group's discussion all that closely, but I think there's general agreement that Gmail and DHTML/Ajax apps qualify as Rich Internet Applications. Ajax apps aren't quite as easily reverse engineered as traditional web apps, but they're much more open than the closed world of Flash (proprietary format, spendy development environment, compiled code, "no you can't have my .fla or special tween class"). This is good.
• Familiarity. While Ajax apps lack some of the richness that Flash provides, they look and feel like the rest of the web. This is also good. (Arguably, Flash's animation capabilities offers the same sort of temptation to designers that a well-stocked liquor cabinet offers to alcoholics. And besides that, I find many Flash applications offer fall into the user interface uncanny valley--they look good but they don't quite feel right.)
• Sharepoint. This is certainly a tangent, but Sharepoint has a lot of DHTML "richness" baked in. It's customizable, flexible, more extensible than anything out there. Unlike Google Maps, it's an application you can actually work with. And yet no one talks about it. I wonder why?

Update: I also wanted to say this: "Ajax-based apps certainly have the potential to produce a better user experience, but good experiences never come by default. Good experiences aren’t plugged in. Good experiences are crafted by thinking about people, not technology." But Jason said it better.