Latest Example ReadWriteWeb: A-list bloggers are so confused about RIA technologies
Yesterday I wrote about how several A-list bloggers are confused about various Rich Internet Application technologies and don’t exactly know what each one is. I also shared an example of how Mary Jo Foley’s recent post was wrong in so many ways and how I had noticed a similarly confused post on TechCrunch a while back.
Swaroop just twittered me the latest example from ReadWriteWeb … Bernard Lunn has post on ReadWriteWeb today titled MetaASO: A Bootstrapped P2P Startup From India and in the middle of the post he says and I quote:
MetaASO stumbled at the first hurdle for me, which was that you need Silverlight and that means a PC (I use a Mac). So I would be interested in any first hand experience with their product. PC is still the best shot for volume, so I don’t doubt the strategic wisdom of going that route.
But wait .. Silverlight does run on a Mac … now if you follow the link that Bernard has linked to with the phrase “you need Silverlight” it very clearly states that the software runs on Windows XP and Vista using the .Net runtime which Bernard miss-translated to “you need Silverlight”.
Microsoft Silverlight player is a cross operating system, cross browser plugin which is very similar to Adobe’s Flash Player. Its has a subset of abilities of the .NET Runtime. The term Silverlight also includes the web application library built on top of the runtime and this library is very similar to Adobe’s Flex Framework
Microsoft’s .NET runtime is a Windows only desktop runtime. Some version of it is included in most recent version of Windows. It allows you to run Windows desktop applications.
These examples bother me because some of the latest applications on the web are being built with Rich Internet technologies so why don’t these voices of the web spend some time understanding the buzzwords before using them.
May 10th, 2008
[...] UPDATE: ReadWriteWeb just posted an article that shows similar confusion, read more here [...]
May 10th, 2008
To be fair, RWW has a healthy list of writers, each with our own strengths. Bernard has business and international experience that I don’t have and I would like to think I wouldn’t have made this mistake. Sarah Perez and Josh Catone have other strengths and weeknesses. Overall I’d say most of our writers wouldn’t make this mistake, presuming that your reading of it is correct and this was in fact a mistake. So, that’s how it goes I think. Thanks for caring
May 10th, 2008
Marshall,
Indeed, RWW has an excellent set of writers and I love reading what you guys write.
I don’t expect everyone to know everything, its totally understandable if Bernard is not familiar with this subject but what concerns me is that All about Microsoft, TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb together are read by pretty much 100% of the tech blog reading world .. now if all these blogs are writing somewhat confused articles about the RIA space then the resultant confusion about these technologies is huge.
Thank you for caring to comment
May 10th, 2008
[...] make mistakes”. However, Mrinal’s second tweet (Mrinal’s articles are here and here) got me thinking and wanted to bring forth some clarifications for the Rich Internet Applications [...]
May 12th, 2008
[...] make mistakes”. However, Mrinal’s second tweet (Mrinal’s articles are here and here) got me thinking and wanted to bring forth some clarifications for the Rich Internet Applications [...]
May 16th, 2008
[...] John Dowdell Brajeshwar Oinam Mrinal Wadhwa [...]
May 21st, 2008
[...] Internet Applications have been gaining a lot of popularity lately, but I had recently written about how some of the most popular tech blogs like TechCrunch, All About Microsoft and [...]