The Now Economy

It was a pleasure to work with the folks at Infoworld on adding a counterpoint to the AJAX application development package they released this week. After all, AJAX is still pull, and the push technology to make the Web work more interactively is still only just emerging…

“What’s Next After AJAX?” InfoWorld (05/23/05); Khare, Rohit

New Web applications that leverage AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) are boosting prospects of more viable Web UIs by providing smoother scrolling, incremental updates, and more interactive input forms. However, fat-client UIs still have the advantage in terms of being able to receive real-time event notification such as instant messaging, stock tickers, and other forms of push data streaming. AJAX allows small download transactions to occur so that the Web UI is more fluid. But asynchrony as defined by AJAX is different than in the middleware community, where the formal definition refers to messages sent in both directions rather than only upstream, as in the case of AJAX. However, developers have come up with a way to keep response connections open in http using hidden frames and JavaScript tags, allowing streamed data into the browser. The open-source ARSC (A Really Simple Chat) program leverages this type of interactivity but requires a modified HTTP server to rebroadcast chat streams to other users. But the broader implication of new Web UI capabilities is application integration, such as with the open-source Nevow and Pushlets for Python and Java, respectively, which allow Web interfaces to fully interact with enterprise applications and Web services. Web UIs will still be limited by slower response times, strained interactivity, and graphical modesty, but new push data streaming capabilities for AJAX bring Web UIs much closer to being a robust platform for application development.

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TradeSports, the Irish betting site that hosts a multitude of sports bets as well as questions on legal claims (which Supreme Court justice will leave the bench next), current events (which city will host the next Olympics, will Social Security reform pass this term) is making a move to enter the US market. Their recent market on the question of which Cardinal would succeed Pope John Paul II correctly picked Cardinal Ratzinger as the front runner. They had fine-grained markets in all the well-known Cardinals and had aggregated markets by region (Europe, Africa, South America) and by ethnicity.

TradeSports’s announcement says that they have established a subsidiary in the US, which will pursue an application with the CFTC to be a regulated exchange. They hope to offer contracts on “such subjects as weather, economic indicators and financial indices.”

Let’s hope the competition is good for TradeSports as well as HedgeStreet and anyone else who is pursuing this route more quietly. I hope at least one of the entrants can structure their application so the questions they offer are open-ended and new kinds of questions can be added dynamically. But I would expect the first applications to specify a complete list of their offerings in order to get approval. That means they’ll be limited to a narrow spectrum of financial derivatives. These derivatives are interesting, but won’t be traded widely very soon. It’s hard to attract large players with markets as thin as HedgeStreet has. More topical questions would lead to more interest, though it would, of course, be harder to argue that the point is “to manage certain financial risks that are currently not provided for on traditional futures exchanges.”

James Annan, a climate scientist working with a Japanese climate research center, recently posted an interesting analysis to the discussion list for the Foresight Exchange. (FX) (more…)