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It Was the Best of Webs, the Worst of Webs

[update 2006-09-04-11:16 I have MSDN on the brain after spending so much recent time on MSDN Forums.  It was MSN Spaces, of course.]

I have two sayings about the Web:

• The great thing about the Web is that it provides a breakthrough in application deployment.
• The bad news about the Web is that applications can be deployed effortlessly.

{tags: orcmid Blogger system coherence core incompetency software lifecycle}

My poster child for this phenomenon is Blogger.com, the host of my blog-page content (but not where the articles are published, thank you very much). 

Thanks to Blogger, I have enjoyed prolific posting to my blogs.  That’s easy deployment that works.  I also need to correct posts with significant regularity.  I do because I can.

I also had the prescience to host my blogs on my own site, so that the published form of the content appears in folders of sites that I control and can back up.  That’s been important, because I have had to use my backups to make repairs following misadventures in the bowels of the Blogger system.  It also means that I can rehost the content-management part to some other service and maintain historical continuity with my existing site feeds and archives.

The downside of easy deployment also shows up in my personal superstition that Blogger breakage is most likely to be noticed on a Friday, because Blogger (and apparently Google) do system-wide updates on Thursdays.  That’s right up there with Second Life Wednesdays (only they don’t do hands-free, secure deployment with Second Life and the almost-weekly mandatory update downloads will seriously impede the ability of Second Life to retain users).

End-to-end testing and management of a coherent user experience is very difficult when it comes to the Internet and especially the web.  The web makes it as easy (and perhaps inevitable) that updates to web-born applications and their host sites will eventually break something.  In addition, it is difficult to provide system testing in a way that doesn’t subject loyal users to risk.  The apparently-hasty roll-out of an MSDN Spaces (now Windows Live Spaces) refresh is a case in point.  I have participated in web-download troubleshooting where the developers and system operators simply threw up their hands and gave up.  There is no good way to know how many others have given up on obtaining updates to the software because the downloads consistently fail to install for some of us.

An example of the incoherence that can result occurred just today in updating the Professor von Clueless blog.  When I posted my article on Core Incompetencies (a great expression from Ted Dziuba) the entire article was digested into my site feed with content of

Epsilon-Delta trustworthy relationship with adopters at the heart of it.

This appears to be the first two words of the article, followed by the last nine.  That’s it.  This is especially striking because my Blogger settings are to have full content included in my site feeds. 

It’s also the case that I am accustomed to this.   I have let Blogger train me to the fact that these odd digests arrive and, sometime later, a full-text version will emerge from my site feed.  When I posted a second article, that’s exactly what happened.  My site feed gave me fresh full-content articles for the new article, the Core Incompetencies article and even the article posted before that one, on August 12.  I don’t know how I missed having the full content for that article until today. 

I claim this as evidence for the degree that we are still at the mumbo-jumbo witch-doctor, tribal herbalist, and snake-oil medicine show stage of software development.   It is daunting that we are rushing headlong into the wonderful world of Ajax and Web 2.0 while nothing new has been added with regard to creating dependable experiences for users.  The hard work remains and there are new barriers (such as life in perpetual beta) that we can exploit to excuse ourselves from rising to the challenge.