Rich Apps are here. Page sites are gone. Internet is wearing a new look. Sites are looking more and more like applications. There are Micro-apps and Widgets, RSS & AJAX! Suddenly the Web looks very WYSIWYG, responsive!

It’s all good. We hear about the quantam leap in the quality of experiences with Web 2.0. And hopefully this richness is driving value in stickiness as well as (most critically) dollars!

This dynamism is bringing in significant shift in the way we interact with web elements. The whole point about Rich Internet Application is that users act upon the information itself. Every piece of the interface is actionable. And users learn to expect that. And this is becoming a standard of a sort since the ‘page model’ does not exist in these rich apps.

This ’shift’ brings us to think about a few issues that we have grown so accustomed to through the ages of the ‘Old Web’. For one, how does one share a page link.  It is so much a part of our web behavior to post or share links that take the recipient to a ‘certain instance’ (traditionally a page) of the target URL. But in the rich apps, this instance is not visible to a larger audience since a large part of it happens locally on the client side. In a very interesting work around, many users I know, have started sending ’screen shots’ capturing the ‘page state’ in stead of a HTTP link. But obviously it slows down the collaborations, because what has been shared is not ‘immediately actionable’. And everyone has a different version of it.

Many people are pointing out flaws even the ‘Indexability’ or ‘Searchability’ of a Rich Web Page:

There has always been a question mark around indexability of RIAs, whether they’re built in Flash, or Silverlight, or even Ajax. The fundamental problem is that static indexing of a RIA is likely to turn up only the user interface of the application, and not the interesting and meaningful data fetched by application logic and presented dynamically to the user. Indexing an application binary or script is akin to having desktop search index winword.exe instead of your documents… not very useful. Most folks are now seeing indexing something like a raw swf binary as less and less useful, as applications become more and more dynamic.
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In the fast changing world of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), a solution to this issue may not be far away. But before that we should define and standardize the Web 2.0 platform first. It is critical to unify the environment rather than fragmenting it by coming up with another ‘rich platform’ with your brand name on it. There are many issues like creating a ‘Meta-infrastructure’ of all the rich media and ways to bookmark various ‘data instances’, that need immediate attention. Because if we cant share what we do, the richness won’t get us very far.