Collaborative Space and Javascript

There are more and more applications that online communities build together.

First, there is Wikipedia which is a collaborative space. Even when finding a certain piece of news, you search in Google which gives you a collection of new from various media, and you should also find it in Wikipedia because anybody can modify that site and incorporate updates into it.

I do not pay particular attention to online collaboration until I found there are thousands of amazing Firefox extensions and search plugins, where people volunteer to write codes to enhance the functionality of Firefox. Then, the Greasemonkey extension brought me to 2 million userscripts which can be imported into the extension to modify websites automatically. Alternatively, those javascripts can be implemented manually by bookmarklets. The Mouse Gestures extension further presented to me how to use javascripts to control Firefox and its extensions, and it has a Gesture Exchange site where people share the scripts they write. Recently, my sister introduced to me Messenger Plus! Live where scripts also extend its features.

The above javascript databases, together with the proliferation of AJAX sites like Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Google Reader, etc. (Google Maps, Virtual Earth...), it seems like javascript is taking over the world!

Also, online collaborative space is so powerful that free goodies are expanding and updating continually like Yahoo! Answers and Google Desktop Gadgets, just to name a few. I do have some contributions in Wikipedia, userscripts and Gesture Exchange. Get to learn more when there is time.