I want to see how the online porn industry adopts AJAX
In a previous post, I pontificated on the predictable behaviors of various groups in e-commerce settings after adopting AJAX-style programming into web sites. I'm now really curious to see how online porn sites will be affected by the platform, and in what creative ways designers and developers will use asynchronous XMLHTTP calls via JavaScript to market their wares.
Suspend disbelief and shelve your morally-grounded reservations for just a minute, and consider the following: pornography on the World Wide Web is a major driving force of information and in many instances has helped promote various platforms (blogs, forums, podcasts, etc.). Sex sells - it has historically embraced, proliferated and progressed the use of several web publishing technologies (image slicing, image maps, database-driven content, authentication, etc.), and the commercial signifigance of selling sex via the Web is well documented. To deny either's commercial appeal, revenue-generating potential, or cultural significance is just plain ignorant.
Conversely, online porn hasn't exactly been quick to implement new web technologies - it doesn't largely serve to be an early adopter of any particular feature or means of communicating with an audience, and largely plays catch-up after a new techonology has been solidified by more mainstream industries. And what CEO of a major Fortune 500 company in its right mind and thinking about prolonged job security would announce at a shareholder's meeting, "We're going to be partering up with Vivid and Fleshbot this quarter, two organizations we really think will take us to the top." In short, online porn literally remains everybody's dirty little secret.
But it's a safe assumption to say that once those who market blue cinema really get a grasp of using AJAX in their online stores, it's going to really retroactively help legitimize the use of such technology for mainstream e-commerce application (even if no one wants to admit where they got the idea from). While most sites e-commerce within the porn genre are of the quality level (or lack thereof) that only further the widely-held theory that they are of poor caliber as the bad movies with which they're so closely stereotyped, but there are very impressive sites in existence today that would, from a design and functionality standpoint, trump most small-budget online storefronts and even give most corporate web-based shopping carts a run for their money.
Nonetheless, it'll be interesting to see the creative implementations and subsequent impacts of AJAX within sites selling porn. Those sites proably won't be the first to do so - but they'll have a huge impact on how AJAX is used going forward.