Monday 2 June 2008

Economic software 2.0

Web 2.0 is discussed by lots of people lots of the time (I'm not an expert here as you can see but please bear with me until the topic meanders on to economic software which it does in just over a sentence's time so really it wasn't necessary to put in this solicitation but who knows it may bring a Tristam Shandy-esque quality to the blog) and is about users generating and interacting with content. Some people think that it could be important for e-commerce.

I'm a fan of interactivity, of course. This whole site is interactive. In economic software, the interactivity is enhanced big-time by the presence of an embedded language controlling the software and which the user is intended to access. An example: software which lets you find estimates from some data, say by putting the data in a spreadsheet and pressing an "estimate" button. The software also has a language which lets the user write a program like:

1. Estimate
2. Store the results
3. Get rid of the most recent year's data
4. Loop over 1-3 until all the data has gone

The utility of the programming language is far higher than the sum of the parts, because the parts are usually too numerous to sum together and often programs can do unexpected things unlike any rigid provided option. Hence the name Economic software 2.0; similar interactivity to Web 2.0, similar improvements in user experience.

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