Mr Espen Antonsen, a system developer from 24sevenoffice, the company I used as an example in my previous essay left me a comment on my previous article about web 2.0 practices, and the benefits that MVC frameworks give you in developing such applications. I figured it was worth replying to his comments with another mini-essay with some thoughts on the advantages of web 2.0ish applications.

As a flickr user, you tend to have a lot of flickr windows open in various tabs. On the top of each of these, there's a inbox symbol with a number that shows how many mails you have in your flickr inbox. Unfortunately, this number does not update until you refresh the page. A easy unobtrusive use of ajax here would be a long running ( every 5 minutes or so) periodic updater that checked for changes to the number of unread items in your inbox, and updated the number.

I'm currently attending a workshop held by jesse james garrett from adaptive path. Jesse is a usability consultant, and the guy who wrote the original adaptive path essay about ajax.
The seminar might be better suited for a designer, or a developer with no prior experience with ajax, but I find some of his thoughts regarding patterns and documentation useful and sensible.