The Conversation Prism V 2.0 by Brian Solis and JESS3. Welcome to the Stream: The Next Phase of the Web. Next generation web-applications. One thing that always bugged me when designing web-based products was the (seemingly) irrevocable law of html-based user-interfaces: if you want to change the data in a page you need to reload it with its entire interface. a clear disadvantage towards PC-based applications.
(or could you imagine MS word re-loading entirely every time you open a menu?) But those times are finally over. thanks to a technology called XMLHttpRequest web-pages can now “phone home” to the server for new data, with the help of javascript, without having to reload. thanks to oddpost, who afaik used it first in big scale, and a couple of other innovative companies we now can look at some interesting usage examples: the benefits, on the other hand, are clear: