Researching JSON-RPC for the “JSON Message” pattern, I came across this interesting slashdot posting from January 24, 2005, a few weeks before “Ajax” was coined …

Seen those funky remote scripting techniques employed by Orkut, Gmail and Google Suggests that avoid that oh so 80’s page reloading (think IBM 3270 only slower) … Now is the turning point. Forget that horid wait while 100K of HTML downloads when the application just wanted to update one field on the page. The XMLHttpRequest object has made it’s way into all the main browsers with it’s recent introduction into Opera and Konqueror (sans the Konqueror bug). This new form of web development now works on Internet Explorer 5, 5.5, 6, Mozilla, Firefox, Safari 1.2, Opera 8 Beta and Konqueror 3.3 (with a much needed patch). (Emphasis Mine.)

Ben and Dion @ Ajaxian also mentioned in their recent podcast they had to stay up late in Las Vegas reworking their TSS presentation because Ajax had just been coined and matched their content.

Sometimes the world is just ready for something.

A recent podtech podcast had a VC mentioning how he’ll often hear a great proposal for the first time, then hear the same idea from five different startups within two weeks. It reminded me of this ridiclous-but-true dotcom-days story from 2000, where a journalist wrote an April Fool’s story about a startup offering free cars with advertising on them. Several real companies meanwhile were planning to do just that, and legend has it that they sweated upon encountering the article. But here’s the punchline:

FreeCar’s Mr. Butler purchased the FreeWheelz joke Web site for $25,000 from Esquire and Mr. Fishman, who split the proceeds. “They got a lot of hits to their Web site,” Mr. Butler reasons. “I have access to their database and prevented anyone else from buying it.”