What’s Going On?

Gosh, there sure is a lot happening; this week in particular, everyone who wants to lash themselves to the “Web 2.0” mast is hard at work, and the buzz flows thick and fast. Right at this particular microsecond, Zimbra (wondering about that name?) enjoys center-of-the-whirlwind status. Check out the architecture; this is a competitor for existing server-side communications products like Microsoft Exchange and Sun’s Messaging Server. It also has a decent-looking AJAX front-end, inspired mostly by Outlook but with what seem to be cool integration hooks (Rich Sharples wonders whether JavaScript is really the right tool for the job). Anyhow, good luck to Zimbra; it’s going to be a bit of a grind selling this kind of business-critical server-side product. It looks pretty good, but it looks incremental, un-radical. Meanwhile, I kind of suspect that Mark Pilgrim may be inventing the future off in a corner where nobody’s looking; you may not have heard much about either Atom stores or microformats; expect that to change.