In general, the simpler the idea, the better.
A smarter fellow from Caltech once said, "Make nothing more complicated than it needs to be." -- readers, do you know who that was?
So the other day when Port80's development team went out for a few drinks at a local watering hole, it became clear to us that not all of life's simple ideas have been applied to the Internet... at least not yet.
If you have ever been a waiter or waitress in your life, you are probably aware of the Drinks First rule. The basic idea is that if you have too many patrons in your zone to serve, you should always get people seated and some drinks in their hand as quick as you can. At that point, they are committed and have something to do and are not likely to leave the restaurant as you scurry about trying to catch up. Now, this concept could really go a long way on the Web as well.
Consider a busy Web server. Wouldn't it be smart to prioritize first page visitors so they get their initial page without delay? The idea is to get the user committed to the site -- and then they may be more likely to put up with slight delays as they dig deeper. Given that sites are designed with heavier pages higher up in site hierarchy and lighter pages later on, this also may be a good idea.
With Web servers, you could probably go a lot farther in user prioritization thinking. For example, you might prioritize users with high bandwidth and low latency first because you could finish off those requests quickly.
Maybe we might call this idea the Quick Checkout optimization:
"If you want less than 10 GIFs, we'll serve you now!"