Last week Google released a new addition to their search offerings, Google instant. Since then every man and his dog appears to have praised any other ‘instant’ that comes along. Google instant is innovative. But not all innovation is visual. Google instant visually IMHO is crap. It flickers too fast, and is often slower than my typing. Well crap for me, not 75% of the rest of the population who type one letter at a time, really slowly. Absolutely perfect for them. Anyway, I digress.

Innovation isn’t always about the visuals. Yes Apple’s innovation is visual. All of their products are visually innovative. However underneath all the fluff. They are bog standard parts. Don’t get me wrong, I am a self proclaimed fanboi. And their user experiences are always innovative.

Google isn’t a visual company. We should all know that by now. The innovation in Google instant is the backend, the server side processing. Imagine how many requests they will now handle a second. And as you all know by now it is 1 billion billion squillion billion gadgillion requests per second. You try and build a website / webapp / server / cluster that can handle that. That is where the innovation all lies.

Come on web people of today, be it designers, developers, sysadmins, even bloggers. You should all very much know by now that lots of the hard work is behind the scenes.

I am not saying that you should not play around, but public praise is different. There have been 1 gadgillion blog posts (from well respected people), and retweets regarding the spawn of ‘instants’. They are wasting resources. No, not their own. The third party server they are polling. Worse of all it is not difficult to repeat Google instant’s visual experience. Not difficult is an understatement Hell, I just did it in 21 minutes flat, using 1 line of code (please use sparingly!), Twitter instant. Be innovative. Come up with something new. We should be praising innovation, not band wagonation.

Right, that’s my rant. If you disagree with anything feel free to troll.

DISCLAIMER: Some of this blog posts contains untruths, made up words, and hell of a lot of blab.

tl;dr;
wasting resources.
I made twitter instant in 21 minutes, “oooo aren’t I amazing”