Next Big Thing

Looking at articles from the likes of Zeldman ect it seems that the next big thing (some already mainstream) on the internet is going to be functional web applications like flickr. Just wondered what other people thought the next big thing on the internet is going to be?

My money is going with the functional applications and I see that a lot of venture capitalists are already pumping money into web2.0 companies, as are Yahoo and Google. Just out of total interest, does anyone know what languages Flickr was written in?

 

[design@ews]

I know that this is something that I am personally looking to learn more about. I might be wrong but I think the language was AJAX.

It's quite exciting to be able to get in there first with stuff like this.

 

[Richard Conyard]

AJAX is a bit more of a technological framework than a language.

On the server side most major languages have some form of AJAX library, if not it's fairly easy to write one. I know that PERL, PHP, Java and .Net have built in library support.

The trouble with AJAX is backwards compatability and accessibility. That is not to say it can't be accessible, but it's very difficult.