I notice people are familiar with websites but not yet with web apps. They all wonder: what’s the difference? Daniel Ritzenthaler from Wurkit makes this pretty clear in one of his Design Thoughts video’s.

I think Daniel’s last sentences is a good start to explain the difference between websites and web apps. So remember: a website is a collection of documents, while web apps perform some sort of value for you.

Does this person plan daytrips on the web for elderly people? Or is he/she a projectmanager for User Experience Designers? And what does the Junior do?

At Pit we chose our job titles carefully and we tried to make sure the ones we chose already existed or were easy to understand. The title for example User Experience Designer could be a topic of discussion. Why didn’t you choose Interaction Designer? Or why not just Designer? Our reason is that the user plays a very big part in our designs and we believe that a good design always needs user input. Therefore we chose the title User Experience Designer instead of those other more common but also less specific ones such as Designer.

Our business has been suffering from a ‘job title identity crisis’ for many years already. For outsiders it’s impossible to understand what we do when they look at our business cards and within the creative industry itself people think of new names for the same job every day. Let’s look back at the Senior Digital Experience Planner. After reading the job description I think this job could be named differently and more easy to understand. How about digital strategist?

I am wondering, is our business really that complex that we need a different title for every minuscule niche? Or are our creative brains just too fond of creating new titles every day?

At Pit we’re also convinced of this fact because we see history is simply repeating itself. The mobile web is becoming more dominant for almost the same reasons it did on the desktop computers, growing bandwidth, much lower development costs, easier updating, more flexible business models, discoverability etc. Therefore we believe that it will not take long for the app bubble to burst, if it hasn’t done that already.

What do you think?

No more Gmail, Youtube, Maps, Google Docs, Google Search, Google Reader and no more Google Wave and Buzz. Ok, maybe we won’t miss all of those that much, but what I realize now is how many of Google’s Services I use on a daily basis and I’m wondering what would happen if they would all disappear tomorrow.

Total chaos on the internet. A world wide web that is crippled like a deer that got shot in it’s leg. Twitter would be overloaded and probably Altavista’s dusty servers would get the ride of a lifetime just before they will be shut down next week. Or will Yahoo keep Altavista in that case? Because the next step will be an enormous race to jump into the gap left behind by Google. Developers working day and night like fanatic World of Warcraft users to create a search engine or mail service similar to Google’s. Or would somebody break in to the deserted Google HQ and try to rob all of Google’s data and leave with a gazillion terabytes of personal information? And would that man be Mark Zuckerberg?

Many questions that will probably go unanswered forever. Or won’t they? It would make an awesome April fools day joke if Google would shut itself down for just an hour. Everybody at Microsoft would jump out of their chairs and Bing would feel like how it’s like to be Google for 60 minutes before going back to it’s dormant state forever.