Following Google back to the UK

I've arrived back in the UK and bring exciting news with me about everyone's favorite search giant, Google.

The company has announced the UK launch of their 'Google Checkout' - see http://checkout.google.co.uk - product which has been widely touted as a potential competitor to online payments giant PayPal - http://www.paypal.co.uk. It's been available US retailers for some time, and this comes as good news to UK retailers by adding further options to what is still a relatively uncompetitive part of the online market.

PayPal has plenty of experience in the market and as with all new comers, I'll treat Google's service as a touch of caution. However the company's record speaks for itself - when it does something, it tends to work very hard to do it well.

Introductory offers are bound to tempt clients in. This includes free service until 2008 to retailers. It looks like a good option to provide for users at the moment, but I'm not sure I'd be ready to use it as my sole payment provider. PayPal have had to overcome a number of problems as their system has matured - I'l be interested to see how well prepared Google's new system really is.

We'll be doing some research and experimentation over the coming weeks. Then I'll give you a full review of whether I think it's ready for you!

What is AJAX?

Busily working away on our first substantial AJAX project and aware that this relatively new technology isn't particular well understood, often even by the techies, I think it's time to try and give a bit of a beginners guide to it (in no more than three paragraphs).

It is an acronym of course (this is the www after all), but the actual name may confuse more people than it helps. The important letter to take from acronym though is the first "A" which stands for asynchronous. AJAX essentially allows the website (or program) to be working on one thing while a user is doing something else. E.g. if you add an item to your shopping basket, you can continue to browse and even add more items to your basket while the program calculates your basket total, delivery amount and tax etc.

You'll start to see more and more 'mini-baskets' appearing on the page alongside all of the products that are for sale - this part of the page will update when you add a product to the basket, but as the rest of the page doesn't need to update, by using AJAX we can avoid refreshing the whole page and simply transfer information between the server and your computer to update the price in the basket. Therefore we're sending less data = quicker experience.

So AJAX is quicker...
It can also add a number of features to the site. There are too many to mention all of them and so far many of them have added little value to the user experience of the site, but its certainly something we'll be keeping a close eye on. Our particular example uses AJAX to reduce the number of refreshes that are required, as described above in the basket example. Our early tests indicate a much more responsive site.

I'll keep up-to-date with new advances with AJAX (it's one of the most talked about technologies these days, and is being heavily used by Google, Yahoo! and many other web companies large and small are taking advantage of it).

And finally...

Happy Easter!