The bigger picture

This script may be the first of its kind and I like that. We have all seen toolbars that attach themselves to the browser, and widgets that get one way information address book information from a site. Until this script, web based address books were limited to importing and exporting contact data.

With Plaxo4Gmail, everything changes. This is truly a web site plugin. We leverage the address book linking capabilities of Plaxo, the script injection power of Greasemonkey and the features of AJAX and xmlhttp to get two sites to communicate with each other, if and when the USER (you!) want them to.

We don't force everyone to have the sync feature. We need no agreements between the host site and the sync partner. We don't have to use screen real estate like you do with toolbars. The features we need look organic to the site we want them on.

I imagine future developers will look to Plaxo4Gmail as a template for other such projects.

I can imagine the day where a very basic site is created. The user chooses which site plugins he wants to add from a "features plugin" page. I'd ask myself, "what local code do I want to run when I come to this site?", and "what capabilities does this site provide that are best for me?".

I could even generate custom plugins for clients of my site that that validate against my server so pirating of plugin code isn't an issue. This could really be the income flow web developers and programmers are looking for when imaging the future of the web.

I don't know if the creator of Greasemonkey ever envisioned his fantastic plugin as the future of web development beyond AJAX, but I sure do.