Yesterday’s post on “Will RSS Whither and Die?” was sparked by Steve Rubel as is this one today from his post entitled, “The Imminent Demise of the Page View.” Rubel gives the page view four years to live and says:

“The page view does not offer a suitable way to measure the next generation of web sites. These sites will be built with Ajax, Flash and other interactive technologies that allow the user to conduct affairs all within a single web page – like Gmail or the Google Reader. This eliminates the need to click from one page to another. The widgetization of the web will only accelerate this.”

Four years is too generous. I give the page view two years to live. Why just two years? Ironically it’s due to what I talked about in my post on Tuesday about Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and the enabling tools and approaches that will leap to the forefront of everyone’s consciousness in 2007.

What goes on inside of a Web browser with Ajax, Flash, RIA’s and other approaches will enable almost complete data and content access without page refreshes. I understand that explicit personalization (presenting user-centric information based on their login and what their profile contains) is fairly trivial, but sophisticated content delivery AND the subsequent data analytics is NOT what bloggers and most web sites are capable of using.

Hmmm…so maybe the acceleration in ease-of-building-and-delivering Ajax, Flash and RIA’s will come with a major increase in the difficulty of measuring who is consuming your content so you can report to advertisers?

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