Now my focus is moving back to the web, but I’ve moved on. Social bookmarking is not on the agenda. Which means it’s time to salvage what I can from Quocial. Therefore, I’m auctioning the Quocial.com domain, as well as some related domains and the @Quocial handle on Twitter. They’re all available as a bundle on Flippa. Here’s the link.

By bidding, you’re not just getting your hands on a great domain (one of only a handful of pronounceable 2-syllable .coms left). You’re also supporting my next endeavor, a webapp that promises to make science more collaborative, more democratic, and more fun. Please spread the word.

I got my iPad in the mail today. Like so many other hapless nerds, I ordered it without any clear conception of what I’m going to use it for. I already have an iPhone and a MacBook; where does this thing fit in? At the same time, I get the sense that I’ll be inevitably developing software (or at least webapps) for the thing in the not-too-distant future, so I might as well get used to it now.

My first reaction was: Wow, this thing’s fast. Application switching is nearly instantaneous, and web browsing is as smooth as on any computer. I’m crossing my fingers that the next iPhone will offer a similar level of zippiness.

Second reaction: Typing is a bitch. Worse than on the iPhone, even. Slow and uncomfortable. Your thumbs can’t reach the center of the screen; this is a weird design flaw, since it makes it virtually impossible to type on the tablet unless it’s on some kind of surface. What the iPad really needs is a split keyboard. That goes for both landscape and portrait mode.

But those things aren’t so important. The really important thing is: Can I read comfortably on it? The answer is, thankfully, yes. In my highly scientific tests (reading a couple of chapters of Wolf Hall in bed), the 1024x768 screen has just enough DPI for smooth reading. (I found that the Cochin font worked best in iBooks, though the default Palatino is nice as well.) Text is way sharper on my laptop screen, but my laptop screen can’t be detached from the rest of the device and held still over my head, now can it? I’d always assumed, like many folks, that extended reading on a computer is uncomfortable because the screen is backlit. Let me tell you, I’ve used a Kindle and I’ve used an iPad, and the two seem to bejust about equally easy on the eyes. Print still reigns supreme—high DPI, low weight (hardcovers excluded)—but the iPad comes in a close second, and the experience is only going to get better in the next few years. E-ink is doomed.

The iPad has other uses that have gotten a lot of press: You can challenge your iPhone-wielding friends to Scrabble! Fight zombies with the kids! Enrage your cat! But reading is its killer app. And while iBooks, the Kindle app, and the various PDF readers are slick, the bulk of that reading is going to take place on the web.

Remember how cool it was when the iPhone brought the web to your pocket? Well, the iPad is bringing the web to your bed, sofa, or wherever else you like to settle in cozily. I’ve been reading the web version of Pro Git, and it’s fantastic. Reading a long, technical book on a computer is a pain, even with a crisp PDF on a top-of-the-line display. The hype is right: The iPad will change the way we consume content on the web. My prediction is that long-form content on the web is going to take off. The iPad might just be the rare piece of sexy technology that actually lengthens our collective attention spans.

[P.S. I feel some obligation to weigh in on the Flash debate: I really wish the iPad supported Flash. It’s an idle wish at this point—Apple’s made up its mind—but it’s not the right choice for their customers.]

But the work the Photosynth team has been doing since their acquisition by Microsoft is truly mind-blowing. I had to check my watch during this 8-minute TED talk by Blaise Aguera y Arcas to make sure that it was still 2010, not 2100.

But then, as the millenium came to a close, and non-protocol related subdomains like webmail and blog began to proliferate, the www prefix began to fade away. To be sure, it remained on many sites as a vestigial reminder of the days of dial-up and Netscape Navigator, but most of the web’s denizens had learned that it could be safely forgotten. As hip newcomers like Twitter and foursquare dropped the prefix altogether, the augurs seemed clear: www was going gently into that good night.

Or was it?

Yesterday, someone posted to Hacker News that the domain nasa.gov is broken. You have to put www in front of it, or it won’t work. (Note that many browsers, like Firefox, automatically put www. in front of the domain you enter if it can’t reach it without it. But the most popular browser, Internet Explorer, doesn’t.) I replied that it had to be a temporary glitch—some idiot added a new subdomain to their DNS records and accidentally deleted the root!—but no, someone else pointed out, army.mil and navy.mil suffer from the same issue. It’s like they don’t want recruits who don’t habitually triple-tap ‘w’ before every web address!

Look: www has got to go. It’s a waste of bytes and time, our nation’s two most valuable resources. If you own a domain, here’s how to fix the problem:

1. Find your nameserver settings, specifically your A records. Make sure that your root domain is pointing to the same IP address as your www subdomain.
2. Redirect www.yourdomain.com/whatever to yourdomain.com/whatever. If you’re using Apache, you just need to add the following to either your configuration or a .htaccess file in the domain’s document root:

   
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.yourdomain\.com.* [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yourdomain.com$1 [R=301,L]

That’s it! Now if anyone tries to use www, even in a link to a specific page, they’ll still get to the right place. It’s so easy, even a rocket scientist could do it.

P.S. If you absolutely must keep www, at the very least allow those who omit it get where they’re trying to go. To do this, just modify the instructions above by using these lines in your Apache config instead:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com.* [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com$1 [R=301,L]

This is what Facebook does, for instance. But just as they dropped their superfluous “The” (remember?), rest assured that there will come a time when Facebook.com will truly stand alone.

Posterous is a poster child for this category. Their idea: hosted blogs. Their biggest rival: Google’s Blogger, which has been around for more than a decade now—and barely changed in that time. In a way, it can’t: Blogger is one of the most popular websites around. Mess with the formula, and they might get New Coke’d. So Posterous comes in with their hip, clean, fresh design, seamless integration with Facebook and Twitter (and, yes, Blogger), and an emphasis on mobile devices, and they’re attracting users like crazy.

But Posterous didn’t just succeed with the same idea as the doddering, decrepit Blogger. They were also following the popular Tumblr by a meager two years, and the sites are in close competition for new features. But Posterous’ borderline preposterous devotion to simplicity distinguishes them from everyone else in a crowded field. Tumblr seemed fresh when it started, but guess what? It’s not 2007 anymore. If you don’t watch your back, staleness can catch up quick.

Posterous’ pitch is three words: “Dead simple blogging.” I’d cut it down to two: Blogger, fresher.

[Update, 1/19/10: A precisely contrary opinion may be found here. We fundamentally agree that design is extremely important, but disagree over which of the two top-notch sites has the better design. I believe that Tumblr’s popularity is mainly due to first-mover advantage. The truth will out.]

Unless, of course, you’re programming user interfaces for the web. Which everyone is.

As Jeff Atwood has said, “Everything that can be programmed in JavaScript will be.” That’s because the browser is the most popular operating system on the planet, and JavaScript is its lingua franca. But no one likes JavaScript. Or, more precisely, no one falls in love with JavaScript the way that people fall in love with Ruby or Python or (my favorite of late) Scala.

I never fully understood why JavaScript was so kludgy and inelegant until I read the (highly recommended) interview collection Coders at Work. Long story short, one guy at Netscape (Brendan Eich) threw the language together in ten days, with the stated goals of creating something semantically Scheme–like but syntactically Java-like. Good god!

So why are we still, 14-odd years later, still using the same language for all of our webapps? Because even if some backwards-incompatible NewScript were introduced, standardized and embraced by Microsoft, Mozilla, Google and Apple tomorrow, most people would take years to update to a browser sufficiently newfangled to run it. Heck, most people don’t even know what a browser is. Thus, new webapps have to be written in a half-baked language to be run through decade-old interpreters.

But there is a solution. And for all I know, Sergey Brin and Larry Page are already plotting its execution from their orbital battlestation. (Where did you think those Google Earth pics come from?) What we need is a new language for web browsers (or, better yet, a virtual machine standard that could support multiple languages), along with a compiler that can generate JavaScript for the benefit of old-timers. The project would be insanely difficult, but it’s half-done already. Look at GWT, which lets you write Java that compiles to JavaScript. Now suppose that a browser (say, Chrome 5) could run GWT’s Java bytecode directly, bypassing JavaScript altogether. Chrome 5 users would enjoy a much smoother and potentially richer web experience. Meanwhile, older browsers would still present a perfectly usable webapp. And programmers everywhere would rejoice.

That, I hope, is the future of the web. So please, Google, I urge you: Don’t let my children grow up in a world that runs on JavaScript.