Mike Gunderloy's ever-interesting Daily Grind has alerted me to another new word (stone cold on the heels of Archiconjecture over a year ago), namely Blogversation.

The blogversation in question is a discussion about how AJAX might be used to improve the user experience of an example shopping site, but in some ways the concept itself is more interesting than this particular example.

However, to play the game properly I will throw in my twopenn'th and say that I believe the instigator of the blogversation has already pretty much nailed it when he says (emphasis mine):

"an AJAX inspired idea to make shoppers buying a sweeter smoother process"

IMHO, it's not so much that AJAX enables any particular functionality, in e-commerce or other areas, but that it can do so in such an unintrusive way that:

  1. many of the "disconnects" that we come to know and hate just disappear, saving us from remembering the navigational nuances of each individual site
  2. it becomes feasible to add "nice to have" features, which we be ruled out of non-AJAX websites as they "just got in the way", but which with an appropriate AJAX-based implementation are there when you need them and aren't when you don't