Delivering new content without leaving the browser.
And this brings us to Figure #3, to increasing real estate values, skyscrapers, high rises and what have you:
Each portlet can now deliver new content and new screen elements to itself without having to communicate to any other part of the browser.
The landscape is no longer flat; it now looks like a Manhattan skyline. One portlet may be a few stories tall and another several hundred. Each time you click on a portlet you're riding an elevator to another floor, and whoever owns that portlet is going to be working real hard to keep you in their building.
The only time a new browser window needs to open up is when you request something from one portlet that won't necessarily fit into that portlet's current screen real estate.
Things are going to get interesting right there. Imagine you're viewing a portal with one portlet, getting a feed from the NYTimes with another portlet getting a feed from the Washington Post. You click on something in the Washington Post's portlet and that opens a new browser window. Essentially this creates new real estate like an ocean volcano creating a new island. But the volcano has also obliterated NYTimes' island.
Somebody won't be happy, and a whole new world of metrics is going to come out of this.
Urban planners consider geographic constraints and the price of land when designing cities. No constraints and cheap land? Build low and wide. In contrast, online geographic constraints and land prices take the form of too much information dispersed too widely, and the user doesn't have enough time to get to it all.
Thankfully, new technologies such as AJAX have helped our attention deficit selves by taking the page -- a broad landscape we could travel easily -- and turning it into several high rises each demanding our attention.
We used to drive through a large town and admire the quaint homes. Now there are billboards, neon signs and boom boxes in store windows, each demanding our attention.
The only difference is they're on what we still recognize as a web page.
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