Building the Realtime User Experience

Chapter 1. Introduction

My wife and I recently had a baby girl. As she grows up, I’ll teach her all kinds of things. Some of the things that I tell her she’ll accept as fact, and other times she’ll have her doubts. But the one thing I know for sure is that when I get to the part about the Web, she’ll be positively tickled when I describe what it looked like before she was born.

I’ll tell her that when we got started on the Web, developers had to be careful about which colors they used. I’ll let her know that when I bought my first domain, I had to fax in some paperwork and it cost me $70. But the thing that will blow her mind more than any other detail is that we had an entire button on our web browsers dedicated to refreshing the web page on the screen.

Even as the Web hit “version 2.0,” most sites were largely call and response affairs. The user clicks a mouse button, data is sent to the server, and some information is returned. Thankfully, the Web that just sat there and stared at you is gone. What was once nothing more than a series of interconnected documents, images, and videos has become much more lifelike. The Web now moves in realtime.

The realtime experience is arriving and, as users, we are noticing it as a fairly subtle change. Unread counts now automatically update, live blogs seem to update a touch faster, chat moved out of a desktop client and onto the web page. From there, more and more things will start to change. Applications that were once merely static websites ...