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Web 3.0
SpunOne writes "Apparently Jeffrey Zeldman is as sick of Web 2.0 as many of us have become. In his latest article, titled "Web 3.0," he really sticks it to the Web 2.0 fan boys, and dispels a lot of the hype generated by our young new friends. It's easy to grow apathetic when a new idea gains so much traction so quickly, but his points are clear and accurate, and deserve consideration."
Oh boy, a new industry bing word. Your website isn't cool without all the stuff like Web 3.0 and XML.
How much you wanna bet this kind of stuff starts off in a marketing think tank?
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
Web 4.0 will kick his Web 3.0's ass. He needs to get with the times.
What's web 2.0?
Nyhetsankaret.com -- det bÃsta av Sveriges Nyhetssido
Just In Case I make My websites with Web 8.0. This should keep me good for at least 2 or 3 more months.
Evolution or ID?
. . .but here is an indisputable rebuttal.
http://www.parm.net/web2.0/
Come on people, we're all sick of buzzwords, but you can't deny the reality of Web 2.0!
Igi
more often than not, big teams have slowly and expensively labored to produce overly complex web applications whose usability was near nil on behalf of clients with at best vague goals.
We need to immediately have a meeting to discuss reducing complexity, increasing usability and clarifying our goals.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
This will beam web content right into your brain! Then.. to enable the DRM, a thug will come to your location and give you a hit or two upside the head with a sledge hammer.
:(
Only problem I am having is getting people to access Web XP a second time
Paul Graham's take on Web 2.0 is a good read.
From A List Apart:It soon appeared that "Web 2.0" was not only bigger than the Apocalypse but also more profitable.
The only difference between 1.0 and 2.0 comes down to the languages used to generate the content. Switch from C++, Java, and Perl to Ruby On Rails, PHP, and Python, change HTML tables to XML, use AJAX liberally. Result? OK, you get Flickr and the like, but it still runs on the same tired architecture. "Web 2.0" doesn't become a reality until "WWW: Then Next Generation" comes to pass, where security and efficiency become the flavor of the day.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
I was surfing the web 2.0 on my Commodore 64
Everyone knows that it won't reallty be usable until it hits Web 3.1.
This guy's the limit!
What the hell is everyone talking about? Did I miss some versions of the internets or something?
I imagine many people will bite here, however this is not a troll post.
Having worked in web development for many years now, I really find that, today, Javascript is a solution looking for a problem to solve. It seems to have only legacy relevance to today's development requirements.
AJAX? Why?
Well, I guess in the 'war' between Gmail and Hotmail, fancy AJAX front ends might make something of a difference, if all other things are pretty even, however for your average developer, how does it apply.
Yes, some people might get a bit of internet fame for creating some bit of software that has rounded corners and gradients, and you can update stuff without the page refreshing, but in my development cycles if I were to propose this:
Planning Phase
Development Phase
Testing Phase
(now we have a working, accessible application)
Development Phase 2 (AJAX it up while maintaining accessibility)
Testing Phase 2
Release
I would be having serious questions asked of me in terms of whether the extra time and cost would ever justify the "benefits". Bear in mind that when we have discussed AJAX implementations at work the first response was "well, aren't people kind of used to page refreshing now anyway? so aren't we potentially confusing people the other way? They expect a page refresh as an indicator of something having changed or happened".
Flame on... I'm gone (but not very sweet)
This rant is no better than someone bragging that they liked such and such a band before it got popular. Then they proceed to complain that the band sold out and no longer writes good music. Oh please!
The summary suggests that he really "he really sticks it to the Web 2.0 fan boys". But really, the article seems like nothing but a pissy rant. He doesn't put forward the issues and talk about them methodically.
As far as I can tell, the only salient point made is that wire-framing a site with AJAX is difficult.
Instead, I propose that:
Web 1.0 is about allowing individuals to create and share ideas.
Web 2.0 is about allowing groups to create and share ideas.
Web 3.0 is about allowing societies to create and share ideas.
The article speculates about the future of blogging and how digital identity will have a much more profound impact on the Web than AJAX and that stuff. This is because, as Howard Rheingold said, "The "killer apps" of tomorrow's mobile infocom industry won't be hardware devices or software programs but social practices."
Anyway, if you are interested you can read the rest.
When a report starts "Apparently..." as though it had never occured to the author until just a moment ago, you can rest assured that you are reading PR
Don't waste your time with it.
In any case I'm waiting for Web 4.3
Just make feeds and tags for everything on your site and that should about do it. Anything else web 2.0 requires will be picked up by the jerk On Rails(tm) in the article's automated web 2.0-based robot. It comes to your site and integrates with everything, disables your browser's back button, and leaves a pile of buzzwords in your guestbook.
stuff |
The author creates a strawman as easy to shoot as the proverbial elephant. It is a pamphlet, not a well constructed argument. As much as I had found O'Reilly intelligent in his careful and well informed elaboration of his ideas on Web 2.0, obviously a concept, like all others, subject to abuse, as much I am sick of nobodies trying hard to position themselves in the counter position.
Modern problems such as dynamic content used to only be avaliable to the big companys who could afford to license server software to run specialized scripts. Now that there are open source web scripting languages which are even more powerful then the older asp and jsp (such as PHP) the internet has become a completely different place. Now you don't need $1000's of dollars to launch a web based company, you only need to learn a simple easy to learn language and have a couple helping hands with backgrounds in webdesign. Now you can build as you go, instead of having to build a skyscraper to get started. Web 2.0 has issues which need resolved, like the rss vs atom content war. I can't wait to see what will come out of Web 3.0. As a modern webdesigner I can not emphasize enough how important PHP and AJAX have been to me. AJAX opens an entire world of new dynamic content for coders smart enough to make it work on all the browsers :)
Is it just me or does he never talk about why he hates Web 2.0? All he does is rant about some lardass at an oversold event who kind of talks about Web 2.0, and thus it turns into hate by association.
I lost patience after, like, three or four pointless pages.
when we get to have Web (20)'95!!! Took Diablo to get me to upgrade last time... wonder what will prompt me to upgrade from 98 this time?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
web 2.0? 3.0?
my web 3.0 is bigger than your web 3.0, and thats all that matters
i don't care
How do you pronounce Web 2.0? Based on the URL's "web3point0", Jeffrey Zeldman's vote goes to "web two point [oh|zero]" Any other preferences?
Who is this Jeffrey Zeldman?
And, as Rasmus Ledorf said, ". Lots of people have been using similar things long before it became "AJAX"."
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Just so. Indeed, may I just offer, amid all this indignant debunking, a simple metric based on fact rather than prejudgement?
One of the many blogs hosted at SOA Web Services Journal is one by Web 2.0 Workgroup member Dion Hinchcliffe. In terms of page views, the blog crossed the 500K mark after just over 90 days...here are the exact stats:
Hits since 24 Sep 2005:
502,587
(4,786.54 per day)
Total Blog Entries:
55
(0.52 per day)
Total Comments: 396
The topic of Web 2.0, and related offshoot movements like Identity 2.0, TV 2.0, Democracy 2.0, Law 2.0 is a major grassroots topic of interest. It's as simple as that.
To the detractors one can only remind them what Bill Watterson used to say: "It's not denial. I'm just selective about the reality I accept."
I guess i'll be holding out and wait for web 3.11 for workgroups. Or Web NT 3.1. Or Web System 10 including cocoa butter. cheers Majello
This opinion is mine, you can't have it.
It's probably bullshit. The world is full of concepts which aren't really concepts - big balls of fluff that proport to be explaining this hard-to-explain idea but are really just hiding the total lack of substance. Web 2.0 is very much one of them. Web 1.0 is trivial to explain and the concept of hypertext really was revolutionary. A simple idea excecuted well that allows people to do something new, or do something old in a radically new way. Same goes for pagerank, same goes for ebay, same goes for every billion-dollar idea that didn't go out with pets.com. Web 2.0 has no meat, no heart, no simple revolution. Smoke and mirrors for marketers and dwellers of the blogospheric ghetto.
Well yeah. EVERYONE had to have a website. Didn't matter what you sold you had to sell it online as well. Billions were invested in making everything available online. Clothes, food, pets, toys. Some made sense (porn) most did not.
Yet at the time it was claimed that the Information Superhighway (remember that one?) was going to totally change the way we lived. The new economy because the old one was just not the way to do it anymore. You actually had companies loosing stock value because they had not announced an internet strategy. Profits? Who cares.
In hindsight of course it all seems perfectly silly. Snail mail disappearing as email takes over. Eheh, tell that to the poor guy slumping a ton of mail with all the christmas cards. Brick and Mortar stores a thing of the past? Oh sure, tell your girlfriend that there is no need to go shopping with her, she can just browse on the laptop while you play Battlefield 2 and it will be just the same.
So the bubble burts, a few companies survived and things more or less went back to business as usual (wich it always does).
Ah, but surely the failure was because the tech was not ready for it? Well now we know better and we are ready for another try. Instead of portals now the buzzword seems to be social networks. Whatever those may be. It is again a combination of tech that has been around for a while but been buzzed up and vague promises about a social revolution.
Bloggs probably are part of it as well.
So what is it? Old tech in a sexy skin and hype. Is it bad? Hell no! I loved the bubble. Fat paychecks, easy going atmosphere and nobody in charge who had a clue as to what it was what you were doing. Websites with a dozen visitors written in code that would crash at the 1000th post and running on sun hardware and oracle databases. The job ads promising a company car have appeared again. Just hope that the geeks this time get proper regonistion and the sex from gullible girls that we so richly deserve.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Web 360, Web Vista, Web IIe and lastly Web v1.2.3pre4(alpha-build5)
I have replaced you with a shell script. You are no longer needed.
However, I have just replaced myself with two shell scripts: the one above and one taking my venture-lent millions and IPO'ing. Further, I have a patent to the business method of replacing employees with shell scripts and will IPO it to make millions. Then I'll write a shell script -- most likely in a different language, Ruby, Haskell, PHP, perhaps -- to do the same as a Web 2.0 thing before reinventing myself for Web 3.0 (there exists a business method patent for reinventing the same business methods again and again, but it's being contested by religions and crime syndicates).
P.S. Word to the wise about Web 3.0: it won't be stable until 3.1 and then 3.11 will bring real connectivity to the Web...
Apache, mod_perl, and PHP have always been Free as in Beer Speech FLOSS FLUSH, and they were used for all the "Web 1.0" apps. People have been hacking on them since the dawn of the Web. How did you ever "need" thousands of dollars to start a company before, where you don't now? Stupid VCs will flush money down the drain almost as readily now (blogs! community! sticky eyeballs! contextual ads!) as they did then (portals! community! sticky eyeballs! banner ads!).
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I believe the correct term is industry mandated bling bling
Sneeringer's maxim of online communities: When users have the power to determine a site's content, the site's content will be determined primarily by those with the most time to waste.
Without some sort of editorial check, the signal to noise ratio of any community-driven online content continously drops. I've seen it on Usenet numerous times. I've seen it on sites like PhotoSig (where the most porn-ish images always get voted up regardless of quality), Boatertalk (where they had to create a whole new forum just for the trolls), and now Digg.
As the need for user filtering becomes more and more pronounced, the value of the site goes down. Why bother going to Digg for my tech news if I have to search the first 3 pages to find something new or interesting?
There are plenty of people out there who care about the sites they participate in and try to make them better. Unfortunately these tend to be busy people, since by nature they care and work hard. As a result their efforts can only be distributed over so many sites. That's why you get great deep discussions on Slashdot, and interesting and accurate content on Wikipedia, but you get mostly crap on most community Web sites. It's why the "Web 2.0" concept is fundamentally not scalable.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
IE won't support Web 3.0 so this article is moot.
I've still not fully figured out Web 1.0 yet.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
But the back button is the accepted way to back out of an unwanted action and if it is not handled as expected or at least disabled AND warned about then people get confused.
I do not and most web developers don't because we usually HATE the back button as it can really mess with your web apps. Use the fucking cancel button already.
Nonetheless your website has to work as expected.
I used non-refreshing pages for a long time. One of them was a long list of songs where I wished to cue songs to be played. Rather then load it each time you "selected" a song by clicking on an image and javascript would then request a new image wich was a script wich queed the song and returned an image to indicate it had been queed.
Granted AJAX goes a lot further and is very nice BUT I hardly see it as a web 2.0
Ofcourse I never was any good at getting millions needed to finance an upstart either.
If Web 2.0 gets the investment money flowing again then good luck to it. The bubble at least had the economy running. Something like the second law of thermodynamics, energy is never lost? Neither is money. For everyone who lost money in the bubble someone else earned it. Me! And frankly that is all that matters.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This reminds me of this time a few years ago, when XML was the big new thing, and every middle manager was insisting that their crappy little development project used it? It still seems like some have yet to realise that XML is about as exciting as when CSV files were invented. Useful and an improvement, yes - saviour of modern technology, no.
It's refreshing, in this article, to finally read a well constructed comment on the reality of the big loada bull that is "Web 2.0" - the whole concept has caused me such a headache. Every time my boss asks whether "we need to be using Web 2.0 for this?", I have to bang my head on a nearby wall.
I wonder....does anyone have more of an insight into why apparently intelligent (technically-minded!) people have this tendancy to strap a new name on a collection of pre-existing technology and tell us all that it's revolutionary? Was it still revolutionary when we were using AJAX-type stuff before anyone thought of the name "Web 2.0"?
Ideas, anyone?
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)
"Come on people, we're all sick of buzzwords, but you can't deny the reality of Web 2.0!"
Here's a way to look at it.
Web 1.0: What I know.
Web 2.0: What my counterpart in India knows.
Jeffrey Zeldman is the author of Designing with Web Standards (and who was somehow never adequately punished for writing that book; please look inside to see what I mean).
... well ... designing with web standards, you know, xhtml & css. Instead, I found it's a 400+ page rant on oldfashioned non-standard design. There's no information at all about design and hardly anything helpful on web standards.
I recently made the mistake of buying that book a while ago, as it seemed to present information on
So, though Jeffrey himself may think differently, IMHO it's silly to regard him as a authority on anything web related.
You seem to have confused the 'edit this page' button on Wikipedia with the 'reply to this' button on Slashdot.
Hope this helps!
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
Recently, a lot of (serverside) frameworks have more or less attempted to add 'easy Ajax!' to their feature list. The problem ? Instead of having to work out user problems with serverside configuration problems, which are relatively easy, they now face a horde of new, ajax-loving users with a huge set of specific clientside related problems, which are far more difficult to solve.
Ajax returning a great RoI, better usability, faster, more desktop-like webapps ? All true, if you happen to have a team of Javascript gurus laying around. If not, prepare for a little surprise at the next browser/framework/.. update.
It seems everyone in this forum is clear on the fact that Web 2.0 isn't the revolution VC's want it to be. At best, its hopeful it will displace the real estate bubble as the bubbliest bubble around.
Ironic that there seems to be some emphasis on usability, as if this weren't possible with the antiquated Web 1.0. What a pant-load! I find Google to be usable. In fact, there are many "old fashioned" sites that are perfectly usable.
People don't go to Netflix because it has "dynamic content"; they go because they want movies mailed to their house. They visit ebay because they want to buy or sell stuff. Am I going to visit ESPN because now there's more crap floating around the screen screaming at me to click-it? Nope, I visit only to see the scores of last night's game, or possibly even to read some commentary. The experience has never been good enough to be a draw in and of itself. Heck, there's a new IMAX theater in town, and I won't even go there until a decent show is screening.
The same basic tenet applies to all versions of Web x.x...
If your site is useful or entertaining people will visit. Dynamic content can help A LITTLE BIT in IMPROVING a site, but they cannot make the site good just by their being employed.
Since when has not being a multi-millionaire been a bad thing?
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
So... What's Web 1.0?
Defining Statistics and Social Research
On the subject of AJAX, has anyone tried to use it from (for want of a better term) 'first principles' - i.e. not just using a toolkit to do the heavy lifting, but written a mini-project to find out what AJAX is fundamentally about?
I did this. The overall impression I get is that AJAX is the term for what is a really ugly kludge. The old RAF terminology for what AJAX is is 'graunching' - forcing components together that don't really fit. It doesn't feel elegant, it feels nasty. It feels like forcing HTTP to do what it was never designed to do. Even a simple interface has performance reminiscent of Windows 3.1 on a 386 when it's running on the latest dual Xeon workstation. Javascript generating fragments of HTML to build a user interface in particular feels like a very blunt instrument, sort of like finding a big enough hammer to pound a screw into a piece of wood instead of just drilling a pilot hole then using a screwdriver.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
The real problem with Web 2.0 is that it completely ignores the power of the client machines. Even if you have a screaming processor with a gigabyte of RAM, it is just the same as if you had a 3 year old machine. While its ok, even ideal for documents and general reading is that what we desire from Applications, which is what Web 2.0 is about? The Web has not really grown up from HTML Docs.
In my Web 3.0, I want applications to use my machine. I want applications to be sandboxed, I want to run them securely, and they need to be fast and capable. Java applets (although everyone hated it) is much closer to Web 2.0 than anything we have now. As much as the Slashdot crowd might hate it, the next version of the Web might come with Windows Vista, with Xaml (SVG like) applications, hardware accelerated 3d graphics, and running with limited permissions. I hope there are alternatives too.
Before you start flaming me, think about cycles wasted per second.
Life is just a conviction.
I for one am waiting for the new and improved WebXP
IAAL
You don't just AJAX something up. It's not like something you just plug in, change a config file, and BLAMO it's AJAXified! You design applications with AJAX in mind. Now, some people will (and have already) used AJAX in horrendous ways (ie: Navigation). But there are many GOOD uses for AJAX. For example, I have a corporate phone directory our receptionists use. It lists all of the employees, indicates if any of them are out of the office, and shows which other receptionists are online. That would be enough if the data was static, but it's not. People are constantly coming and going, receptionists step away from their desks, and contact info is updated. In order to keep all of the receptionists on the same page we have two options. 1) Use a hidden iframe that posts back every 10 seconds, checks for updates, and refreshes the iframe containing the employee list. 2) Use an AJAX method to communicate with the server and update the employee DIV. Using AJAX can get rid of iframes (making it easier for text->speach readers to interpret), removes the refresh "click", reduces complexity on the page. and just all round makes the page smoother.
When making this desicion we didn't just "AJAX it up" we made the design decision and organized the entire project around that decision.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Everyone wants to jump onboard a cutting-edge bandwagon while there's still room. Unfortunately, real innovation is few and far between and requires determined effort from brilliant people. Fads like Web 2.0 are like get rich schemes for techies - we allow the promise of something for nothing to cloud our rational judgement. Cognitive dissonance kicks in fast and we won't let anyone spoil our dream even when we're haemorraging time and money into obviously dead-end endevours. Eventually some little economic toto pulls the curtain, reality becomes impossible to ignore and the crash comes.
Yes, they always have been, but they haven't always existed. PHP is at the forefront of web 2.0. Something tells me your not a webdesigner. A windows server to run asp or just licenseing for the dynamic content languages before ment investing in your own private server and paying all kinds of licensing fees to get it operateing at all, then you have to worry about getting visitors. Now with search engines tieing the internet together better then ever you don't have to worry about getting your visitors as much if you have content they will find you. With the invention of free scripting which can produce dynamic content you don't have to pay outrageous licensing fees any longer. It allows small groups to get information out to the masses, like JibJab the overnight hit of a couple flash animators. 5 years ago they wouldn't have been able to get on their feet. Now you can buy hosting cheaper too due to the large number of webpages around hosters can offer cheap hosting and distribute the cost of implementing servers with langauges that have licensing fees.
Users tend to like Web 2.0 apps. A friend of mine showed me his company's Basecamp setup and I was blown away. He had over 30 employees and outside vendors working on about a dozen different projects, and all of it was managed in Basecamp. For $100/month, he is able to keep much better track of everything than in the past, when he relied on Entourage and a variety of other apps to pull it all together. He has people using Windows, he has people using Macs. He has a slim IT department. His people actually enjoy using Backpack, which also makes his job easier, because he doesn't have to cajole them all the time.
The best of the Web 2.0 apps have a transformative effect for users not because of any technological revolution, but because the apps feel much more like client-side apps. They operate smoothly and feel more fluid. Scoffing at this is akin to saying that user interface improvements are not very important, which is odd coming from someone like Zeldman. Even subtle changes in how an app works at the user end can make a huge difference in how the user feels about the app. The very fact that people refer to Web 2.0 products as apps rather than sites shows this. Sure, dynamic websites have always really been applications. It's just that to most users, they didn't feel that way. Now, because of new coding approaches, the apps feel like apps.
Is this an epic revolution? No. But it is the start of something new, in that a host of small companies with far less startup funding than in the Dot Com era are starting to pop up. They're trying different things. Many of them are trying the same things in slightly different ways. Most of them will not last very long. But this time, the money situation is different. Web 2.0 isn't about huge VC money and absurdly valued IPOs. It's about real businesses following established business practices. Figure out how to make something that people want to use. Figure out how to make money doing it. Go do it.
I can understand why Zeldman is wary of the hype, but just because the VCs are jumping on the bandwagon doesn't mean that Web 2.0 is pure hype. To me it is invigorating to check out my TechCrunch feed and see so many interesting web applications popping up. The future has not yet been commoditized. As a whole, the web development community has learned a great deal about what works and what doesn't, not just from a technology perspective, but from a business persepective. In my opinion, Web 2.0 is much more about applying those lessons than about the breathless hyperbole of VCs. It really is different from the Dot Com era.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
*ahem*
I've done web development work for three years now, but it's business-to-business stuff and not consumer-oriented. I assumed you were talking about the expense of setting up development, not the costs associated with getting noticed (i.e. marketing). My bad.
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That was the biggest load of incomprehensible bolox I've seen today. There will always be spin doctors and idiots who listen to them, why waste time and effort complaining about them. There is more to Web 2.0 than AJAX and XML, read http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2 005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html?page=1 and stop complaining about how you liked XML before it became fashionable.
This is not the sig you are looking for...
or do most Web 2.0 websites use the name "meta" in the domain name.
If all the chatter about "Web 2.0" reinvigors interest in the web, and keeps us employed, I'm fine with it. There's always going to be the paracites, huksters and snake oil salesmen, and there will always be suckers to buy into it. Buddy Hacket said "I've had a few arguments with people, but I never carry a grudge. You know why? While you're carrying a grudge, they're out dancing."
There are people who think "Web Standards" is snake oil, as well. No me, but other people.
I agree with you that AJAX seems to be an answer to a greater problem. The problem (as I see it) is that the HTML was originally designed for viewing static web pages. There may have been some code or scripts behind the page generation itself, but you still only loaded one page at a time. Over the years there have been a couple of trends that have spawned to help solve this "single page load" problem.
The common ground that these trends (Frames, Javascript, Flash, AJAX, etc.) share is that they all try to bring the user closer to achieving a truly dynamic experience. All these trends are in someway trying to overcome the "single page load" problem that is inherent with HTML. Each of these technologies have their own strengths and weaknesses, but the core problem will still remain until enough people realize the problem for what it is and try to solve it.
Desktop applications are giving way to web applications. Most people are not computer savvy. The few that are (but do not work in a related field) know what they know about computers because they need to, not because they want to. No person should have to know about installing drivers, software patches, or resolving hardware conflicts. Web applications require no installation and no maintenace (except, of course, for the hosting system). It should be no surprise why these types of programs are catching on.
Web applications will continue to strive to bring the user a better, more dynamic experience. However, until the underlying problem of the "single page load" problem is addressed by HTML and it's related processes, it will most likely remain this half-breed of application.
Web 2.0 reminds me of the XBox 360, a little bit better and a whole lotta hype.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
...you're new here, aren't you? :-)
The author was trying to convey his sense of disillusionment to the whole "Web 2.0" debacle. His point initially was that he was attending a conference and overheard this gentleman in front of him spewing forth the hyperbole of the "Next Great Thing" dismissing the current structure of the Web as "Web 1.0" which he obviously just heard from another conference.
The author then goes on to state that "Web 2.0" was already alive and active prior to the term "AJAX" being coined in a white paper, meant to associate the use of 'Dynamic Content' (Of which there really isn't anything 'Dynamic' involved, because EVERYTHING has to be scripted to react) with using Ruby on Rails, XHTML, XML, and Javascript. The author then points out the obvious, that because this was already being done, it is STILL a work in progress. The author states that he identifies this due to the fact that he visited FLICKR and was able to find 'blank voids' that did something where nothing should be occurring. 'Undocumented features' found in a web page. The author then goes on to compare his work (and his team of people) to what is being said to be 'Web 2.0' and bemoans the fact that just changing the acronym or version name doesn't make a NEW product.
The article then mentions the fact that more work is done by less people with more results than the 'big' teams working on JAVA and other 'applications'. The article equates big teams as bad and small 'dynamic' teams (there is that catch phrase again....)as the way to actually accomplish anything. The author finishes by hoping that this 'Web 2.0' does not lead to another bubble pop as was the dot.com's situation.
Just because....the term 'Dynamic' can never be applied to a web based application, nor for that matter any application. All events are scripted. Nothing is 'created' based on input/function. Any program or any application cannot be 'Dynamic' because the computer does not have the ability to just 'make stuff appear' based on the thoughts or needs or desires at the time of the input. If the web were truly 'Dynamic' there would be no need for any other application, as the system would see the need and fill it on demand. Just my thoughts on that term.
You keep going until you die..."Me".
I'll just skip all the way to Web 40,000. At least then I can use Space Marines for site security against Chaos-bred spamworms.
I don't understand why people have such a distaste for all things labeled 'Web 2.0.' I'm not a fan of buzzwords, and there's nothing I hate more than a middle manager with a head full of technologies he knows nothing about. But let's forget about all that and think about what it is we are trying to accomplish. I don't know about you, but I would like to make better web sites. Web sites with better usability.
Let's face it, Tim Berners-Lee never fathomed the web would be used the way we use it today. The HTML protocol was just not made to support rich e-mail clients that check our spelling as we type, or maps that allow us to drag them around transparently gathering information from the server in the background without refreshing the page. I don't see how anybody could disagree with the fact that these features enhance a user's experience on the web, and they would simply not be possible without AJAX or some other still undiscovered technology.
The sooner we stop complaining about people improperly using 'Web 2.0' buzzwords and start thinking about what this technology gives us as web developers and how we can embrace it and enhance it, the better off we will be, and the better off the users of our sites will be.
I havent finished web 2.0 yet!
Oh okay maybe that is over cynical. However what was the first bubble? Was it perhaps that the world believed that somehow a combination of tech was going to change the way we lived our lives?
Well, it did, didn't it? At least for tech consumers, anyway? Are not people walking around in a little personal impenetrable bubble of technology with iPods and cells and whatever else hanging off them like bandoliers and gun belts of the Wild West?
Oddly enough, this creates a rather paradoxical effect, where people directly involved with tech become the biggest Luddites. What was wrong with the old Web? The technology? Not likely. The problem that has always existed is that technology doesn't solve problems without proper application, meaning that you need a problem to solve. Tech's a tool. It's there to accomplish a task in a larger abstraction, not to exist by itself. Using the inappropriate tools to accomplish the tasks of a larger abstraction, or by pursuing abstractions which have little value added to anyone is the problem of the Web (which is where online commercial ventures go wrong), not that we're using straight HTML or XHTML.
Personally, I'm waiting for Web 5.5. I hear it cures cancer, balances your checkbook, and cooks you a hot meal (even if only someone you know uses it!). I'd have said Web 5.0, but that version balances your cancer, cooks your checkbook, and cures you of the need for hot meals.
Web 1.0 is about allowing societies to create and share ideas.
Web 2.0 is about allowing groups to create and share ideas.
Web 3.0 is about allowing individuals to create and share ideas.
Web 1.0 is about allowing societies to look stupid and bore each other.
Web 2.0 is about allowing groups to look stupid and bore each other.
Web 2.0 is about allowing individuals to look stupid and bore each other.
That is all.
Web X will overthrow the power of whitey!
Caaaaaaan you diiiig it!
Isn't XML the CSV of Y2K?
tone
tone
I'll of course do the Web 2.0 thing and satirize it all on my blog later. But speaking of funny discussions, isn't it time for another Sony story to break?
I for one am far more sick of hearing people bitch about the hype surrounding AJAX, Web 2.0, etc. than I am of hearing the hype itself.
// This is not a sig.
Think that first was created the www, static pages, dynamic pages, etc, and in the last days of last decade was created InvestorWeb 1.0, the new gold fever, the boom, the "you must be here" next thing. No matter if you do a hello world plain html page or a fuzzy full graphic high bandwidth dynamic site, you could not miss it. Of course, it crashed, too much hype without understanding is a bad thing. Technologies advanced, a lot happened that changed how people see the web, and now is time for InvestorWeb 2.0, with the hype component of the 1.0, but with new gadgets, and, maybe, a few lessons learned from the past. Will it fail as the 1.0 version? time will tell.
There is a tech web 2.0 too, that is evolving into current form since last decade and still have a long road to go till reaching a final form, where the things will be more integrating than linking, where people is more colaborator than visitor, where "where" will be more "the net" than certain URL. I could call that target Web 2.0, not the call for investors to come.
Watch it, you! I'm working on replacing you with a blooming shell script too! All those buzzwords and you don't really know what you're talking about. Web 3.11 for Workgroups isn't best-of-breed i-enterprise synergy, it's long-view market leader innovation for maximised return on investment across a multi-disciplinary workflow of uncompromising fruity goodness. Please don't undersell the vision, man. And, man, am I buzzed about that vision. Woo!
I don't know what Web 2.0 is. In trying to educate myself, I have not been able to find a clear definition of what it is -- which is indicative that Web 2.0 is a general fuzzy idea at best right now. I looks like there are two distinct parts of Web 2.0 -- one is about types of applications (i.e. social networking apps, etc.) and the other is about various technology.
That these two are arbitrarily grouped together and labeled Web 2.0 doesn't make much sense to me. It's clear that social networking apps like delicious, flickr, etc. can exist without AJAX, XML, or whatever other technology. Also, the new technology is not limited to the ones typically mentioned in Web 2.0 articles.
Without overhyping or understating it, the new technologies are certainly useful (Google Maps, various other Google project), and the new concepts (social networking, Flickr, etc.) are certainly interesting regardless of what technology is used.
Well, it's no different than when some moron kicked off a job that tied up the line printer for an hour when you had to print out your CS101 project before it was due, or someone else somehow managed to eat all the disk i/o or filled up /tmp, etc. Remember how long it took a VAX cluster to reconfigure when one of its machines crapped out? OK, it was cool that the whole thing didn't just blow up, but it took 5-10 minutes for everyone else's terminal sessions to go back to not being virtually locked up as if someone had remotely Ctrl+S'd every tty on the other boxes.
Me? I personally like how GMail (and maps.google) work with AJAX. Compared to their competitors, they just work WAYYY better, not only because of their AJAX stuff.
I have this feeling that, unless I lose my present job and have to do whatever it takes to make a living, I will never write an 'AJAX' application. Never. It's not that I don't like it. It's just that, for me, I will always see the web as a medium for distributing information, and information is best distributed in its least-complicated form, both conceptually and visually. Oh, I'll use CSS, XHTML, and I'll even do plenty of back-end stuff. But that's all in service to the main goal which is to inform or distribute.
The fact that AJAX is not totally browser-neutral only serves to drive the feeling home even harder. I just got an iPaq. It's pretty neat, and it's the 4705 model with the 480x640 screen. But with the exception of a few web sites, it's mostly pointless to try to pull up a typical web page on it (basically, IE 4.0). Even the web site for a company that specialized in protective cases for PDAs doesn't display properly on the iPaq!
Now, not everything is embedded, so it's unfair to suggest that everyone conform to the lowest common denominator (NCSA Mosaic?). But to me, this just reinforces the feeling that I already had, which was that web sites are most useable when they're simple and comform to the original markup philosophy. To me, caring about the width of the web browser window, and even moreso the height, is something to be avoided.
When I first started learning web programming, I build this really complex page with sidebars and decorative borders and all sorts of stuff. It looked really neat but was really confusing. After consulting with my personal expert on usability (my wife), I redesigned it completely to be simple and to the point. All the navigation stuff you needed was there, but it was just simplified and relatively unadorned. The result was 100 times more intuitive. It's too bad most web site developers don't have usability experts who specialize in making things intuitive to use. And you don't need AJAX to do that.
My point is that it's naive to assume that everyone's going to be connected to the Internet all the time. I enjoy having a local cache of my IMAP mail server's folder structure on my laptop so that I can compose messages off-line and have them sent the next time I connect to the Internet. To me it doesn't make sense to pay $60-$80 a month for a cell phone plan with unlimited data or $30 a month for T-Mobile wi-fi access just so I can access my old e-mail while on the go. Even at "54" Mbps, the network presents a huge performance bottleneck for many applications.
For more information, click here.
Slightly old, but good:
http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2005/12/27/web-2
I certainly see some need (in certain cases) for asychronous activity in a web application. All of us have used Javascript and hidden IFRAME hacks before. Not pretty, but it works.
All that being said, I can't understand all this hype. If I want a rich, interactive application, distributable over the web, then I would probably opt to write it in Java and distribute it as an applet or through Java Web Start. If I wanted native widtets, I'd write it using SWT.
Am I the only one who thinks that dynamic page updates are overrated and unnecessary 99% of the time?
I hope you'll pardon a minor rant, but once upon a time, when we developed programs that ran on the user's computer, it was de rigeur to allow the user to control the color and size of text being displayed. Even when we were working in text mode so all the text was the same size, we at least allowed users control over the colors.
Now, the average web site has changed that completely -- in terms of actual responsiveness to the user's needs and/or wants, we're roughly back to the usability level of dumb terminals connected to a mainframe. You're only going to get something the way you want it if you happen to agree (in detail) with the designer of the web site about how you should get it.
From what I've seen, Web 2.0 mostly deals with the wrong things -- admittedly, much of what it attempts to do needs to be done as wall, but on a realistic list of priorities, none of it would even be in the top 20.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
the web has a few more fads than 2 since its been around.
why do we suddenly have to change the name of something that progresses.
im going downstairs to watch tv 14.0
soon im gonna have lunch 24.0
with wife 1.0
then get in my car 11.0
and go to job 16.0
Just so. Indeed, may I just offer, amid all this indignant debunking, a simple metric based on fact rather than prejudgement?
First, you obviously didn't read the link in the post you're replying to. (Unless you're being equally tongue-in-cheek.)
One of the many blogs hosted at SOA Web Services Journal is one by Web 2.0 Workgroup member Dion Hinchcliffe. In terms of page views, the blog crossed the 500K mark after just over 90 days...
Second, the popularity of a blog or the ideas therein does not in any way constitute a benchmark of the validity of those ideas. And the stats you quoted (that I snipped) aren't even that impressive. 55 posts in a hundred days? Less than 400 comments? jwz posts more often than that in his LiveJournal and gets that many comments in a week. Should we be talking about jwz as the new hotness in web technologies? Obviously he's more relevant than Web 2.0!
The topic of Web 2.0, and related offshoot movements like Identity 2.0, TV 2.0, Democracy 2.0, Law 2.0 is a major grassroots topic of interest. It's as simple as that.
So is the alien autopsy at Roswell, the number of people associated with the Clintons who've died, and abiotic oil. Just because people have an opinion about it doesn't make it relevant either.
"Web 2.0" is just the latest incarnation of herd behavior in VCs and pretentious web-design fanboys who take themselves way too seriously. Google did not set out to create a "Web 2.0 application" with Google Maps, nor, I would wager, did the guys who created Flickr or other tagging sites, or the developers of any successful site using Ajax. They just created something they thought would be useful and used a new tool (AJAX/Ruby on Rails/etc.) to make it a little spiffier than it would have been otherwise.
Web 2.0 is not the radical break with the past that everyone seems to want to believe it is: this is just the latest swing of the user-side/content-side pendulum back toward putting code on the user side. (For another increment of the swing, see Google Earth.)
-- Old Man Kensey
Web 2.0 bringing everyone to use only web based apps, BellSouth's plan to have added fees come into play, everyone has to pay tons of additional money just to have access to a word processor. GG.
No offense to author, submitter or anyone else, but who is Jeffrey Zeldman and why should I take this 'article' with any more than a grain of salt? Other than pointing out a few useful pieces of software, what is this article really about?
I'm seeing more sites that load slowly. Sites that need ten seconds or more to load over an idle DSL line are becoming common. Often, the delay is caused by page layout designed to delay loading until all the ads load. The renderer reformats frantically as the content trickles in. Sometimes it's because the server is overloaded servicing the within-page requests. This is a big step backwards.
On the hysteria front, there's a site devoted to AJAX page layout. It contains a long section on how to get a page with three columns of the same height. Javascript is used to compute the length of each column and align the columns. Differences between browsers must be handled. It doesn't work right in IE Mac 5, Firefox 1.0, or Opera 5 and 6. (But it's fixed in Opera 9b and Firefox 1.5!) Special cases are required for Opera 8 and Safari. All this to get three columns. Write once, debug everywhere.
That's what HTML tables are for.
Its not like Web 2 replaces the HTTP and FTP protocols, and it isnt some new super easy way of coding HTML (if you by anymeans think HTML is hard, you can also proudly call yourself a low IQ capacity "Special Person") - so therefore it isnt really a new version of the Web.
/. forward of it, most of the tech behind "Web 2" has been around for years - and the stuff that actually is new is just new languages and methods to display content - nothing more, nothing less...
What the hell do you think happened when Java, Javascript, VisualBasic, PHP, ASP, web-based database managed forms, Flash, Perl, CGI, XML, SGML, and any other language or content display method was released - they did not rename the Web from 1.0 to 1.5 when XML and Flash were released, and the same goes for the others. Like the article and everybody that posted on the
Uhm... Why do we *need* to use those cycles? What will it give us?
The internet in general is about the movement of information. The web is about the sharing of information. Where are those cycles going to go?
Sure, you could have web-based Quake 4, but what's the point? If you want to waste cycles, why not do that with client-side games that run natively, and can take full advantage of those cycles rather than wasting power on some sandboxed non-native language?
XAML doesn't provide much more tha XUL at the moment. So, in the way, Web 3.0 is already here. But you know what? It's still just the web, it's still just a way of sharing information.
Instead of wasting those cycles re-inventing Flash, why don't we use them for client-side information management? Why don't we form communities of trusted computers that sift through all the information (HTML, RSS, whatever) available to find specific relationships?
We don't need to waste resources on "Web x.0". We need to figure out what to do with the information we have.
But that's just my opinion. It's your computer; waste cycles on whatever you like.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Don't get caught in AMT hell when the stock tanks.
sulli
RTFJ.
Although the article is well written and an easy read, there is actually little factual information as to why the author does not like Web 2.0 or doesn't think it is an advance in technology. Although I tend to agree with the article, I don't think it contributes much in terms of intelligent discussion.
I think over the next few years the real progress will be in the following key areas:
1. Content
2. Producer/consumer gap
3. Location independence
First, with respect to content, much of the web is dominated by what could be called amateur content. How many more podcasts do I have to listen to where every second word is uhm... and aww.... You can really tell most of them were simply recorded in a hour or two, received little or no editing, and then were hastily uploaded to the nearest server as fast as possible. There is something to be said about everyone having the ability to put content on the internet. But, there is also something to be said about the value of content developed by professionals. I think over time we will see higher quality content and there will be better mechanisms to sort out the signal from the noise. As an example of at least improved due diligence, we have sent out over 70 review copies of a recent product. http://www.developeradvantage.com/
Second, the producer/consumer gap. Surprisingly, there is still a significant gap between the producers and consumers, which I would expect to shrink. This gap is filled with people skimming off profit or passing on cost when really they don't need to be involved. It is interesting that I think some of the most successful internet companies are not directly producers (say of content) but really are simply in the middle. Think about amazon.com or ebay or even google. Should people be buying directly from amazon or directly from the publisher or why not directly from the author? Historically, editing and distribution were huge advantages of going through a publisher, but, now with the Internet, distribution should be much more simple and often online communities, private or public, function as extremely thorough editors and reviewers. So what is the benefit of having all these people in the middle? We know they add to the cost, how do they help in terms of benefits?
Third, location independence. Arguably the most successful physical product in the last couple years has been the iPod. What does the iPod give you? Well, really it means that you can take the equivalent of boxes and boxes and boxes (depending upon the size of your box), and listen to them where ever you go. The iPod gives your music location independence. I can see something similar happening with video, but I don't think it will be as successful. There are biological limitations to how much an individual can do at one time. Audio is attractive while "on the go" but it remains to be seen if video will also be successful. I don't think natural selection will be kind to those who exceed the biological limits on what they can do at what time.
FREE - Java, J2EE and Ajax Audiobooks for Software Developers - www.DeveloperAdvantage.com
In web 3.0 servers will not continue to fail under the weight of being slashdotted.
Well, I keep hearing about how cool maps.google is - but I really don't get it. All I get is a blank page with loading... on it. Boring to me. Maps24.com otoh works, and looks pretty nice. Of course, it uses the "old" java technology, but it does stuff.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
I dont believe web 2.0 is a good way to go, having desktop apps, that can query databases, and are as secure as a plain HTML web page would be so much better my case in point is google earth, it is more or less a desktop app that gets all its content online a desktop app with an internet explorer window in it can basically do everything any old web site does and more
In what version do we get rid of SPAM?
Hate to reply to myself, just wanted to point out I am aware Google maps user hidden iframes to do its magic, before someone points it out to me :D
IMO: just stfu and code it, or just stfu, instead of ranting about it on your lame-ass blogs.
Is it just me, or are Bloggers the lamest users on the internet today!?
I don't know what is worse... saying "I have a blog" or "I use AOL".
Another thing I love, is when 'web developers' spend their entire day 'blogging' about programming on a 'blog' that they didn't even program themselves. *lame*
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
Actually, this is not true. I wish it was, but it's not. . .
One of the ways Amazon keeps its costs down is to keep as little as they can in stock, thereby limiting the need for warehouse space and maintenance staff. For small publishers, Amazon's largest 'bulk' order might be 2 copies of a title. Amazon basically makes storage each individual publisher's problem. I don't know how they handle Stephen King or J.K. Rowling, but for small press, it's 1 or 2 copies at a time. --And this remains the case even after a small press earns a year-long track-record at Amazon of their title selling seventy or more copies.
Is it more expensive to make forty small shipments to Amazon rather than one or two big shipments? You bet it is. Hundreds of dollars more.
Because, you see, Amazon, unlike most other book distributors, never pays for shipping from the Publisher. The publisher pays to ship books to Amazon's sorting department, and the end customer pays to have books shipped from Amazon to their door step. Amazon never buys a single stamp or pays a single FedEx bill. Nor do they have a fleet of trucks like most real distributors. Why should they when everybody else is paying to ship?
And for this 'service' Amazon feels right in taking a 50% cut of the book's cover price. --The remaining 50% must pay the publisher's production, printing and shipping costs. Is this reasonable? No, it is a damned rip-off. But that's Amazon.
Amazon is nothing but a glorified search engine. I use Amazon to find the title I'm after, and then I make a side sale directly with the publisher or used book store in question. At least then the money is going to people who have actually earned it.
-FL
It should be noted that it's possible to use AJAX with XUL in Mozilla. XUL gives you a UI toolkit based around a DOM, and while it has its shortcomings it's definitely a lot better than HTML. Since XUL is XML-based the same techniques used to deal with AJAX in HTML can be applied, but you also get XBL bindings which allow you to hide bundles of functionality behind opaque objects thus creating custom widgets. Also, both the builtin widgest and any custom ones can be styled using CSS so you can still get your brand in there.
Of course, it only works in Mozilla-based browsers. Not much good on the Internet right now, but at my company we have a few internal webapps based on the Mozilla "platform" which seem to work well for the users. I think this is a good place to head: all that's lacking is a good standard which serves the same purpose as XUL. XUL itself is adequate, but there are a few places where I think it needs a bit of work before it can be considered good enough for widespread development. XBL is already good, and for Mozilla browsers it can already be applied to HTML and SVG documents so it's by no means XUL-specific.
Microsoft seems to be heading in a similar direction with XAML. I think it'd be a good idea to get a good, general, open standard out there before Microsoft launches XAML and it's too late.
> As for me, I'm cutting out the middleman and jumping right to Web 3.0.
> Why wait?
You're not the first, man. Here's Web 3.0 description by Twisted's architect extraordinaire Glyph Lefkowitz:
"Web 3.0", or Why Mantissa is What the Web is Missing
http://www.livejournal.com/users/glyf/47582.html
I can't wait until Microsoft launches the production version of Web '98. It's due late Summer of 2007.
* Si hoc legere scis numium eruditionis habes *
Um, snail mail volume is way down for basically everything except Christmas cards, causing the post office to abandon a lot of public mail boxes and even branches from lack of volume.
Brick and Mortar stores a thing of the past? Oh sure, tell your girlfriend that there is no need to go shopping with her, she can just browse on the laptop while you play Battlefield 2 and it will be just the same.
True, but for guys who hate Christmas shopping and such, there's never any reason to ever venture to the mall alone.
I generally agree with your sentiment though. People aren't doing new things online, they're just doing the same things they've always done, only faster and without going anywhere. And that's good enough for me.
Minimally, the next move is going to be utilizing client side resources, which are currently being left out of the picture of web software. Everything is about to become an internet device - mobile phones, televisions, game consoles. I think applications like Google Earth are probably typical of the future - programs that seamlessly integrate client and server resources.
And the security? Imagine above and think Microsoft. Why just to stop integrating IE to OS, why not tie both to server also directly?
And what about developers? I'm sure there are lot of good points of having things like Ajax, but GUI based systems that can provide clean looking user interfaces are really, really complex. You have to map each exception and situation flawlessly. Just like the writer of original article pointed out.
Very good point of HTML is that it is simple itself, but it can be manipulated by very complex rules by things like PHP.
Now you got actually three complex layers: the presentation , business logic AND sending/receiving data.
To help in this 'simplicity', we have such wonderful error free and elegant solutions like javasctipt and XML that we all designers love without a question. Not. Both are really wondeful in theory, but quite headaches in practice.
Nobody knows the trouble I've seen, nobody knows has the trouble seen me, even I sometimes wonder why I write these line
I don't wish to reconfigure my browser for every web page I want to read. If that's required to browse the web, I'll go back to reading books and watching television where I don't have to spend time increasing or decreasing text and picture size.
I think that many of you don't mind hitting four keys when one could have been sufficient or constantly accessing the browser's menu to adjust something because that's the geek/Unix experience. It is similar to the activity needed to drive a car with a manual shift transmission: "By God, look at me. I'm doing something important."
Whatever happened to the concept of "user friendliness"?
Fata viam invenient.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
While a recognizeable obscure quote from the movie Flash Gordon by itself is very worthy of kudos, this entry loses 4 point for being in the much more popular Queen song from said movie soundtrack, which makes it all the less obscure.
Winner: Iron Chef!
PHP is at the forefront of web 2.0
...
Lorf, I thought it was Ruby on Rails. PHP is old hat.
I'm really sick of seeing these meaningless terms such as "Web 2.0" being thrown out in the first place. If you're using specific technologies, just say "I'm using AJAX, Ruby on Rails, and Podcasts".
The small startup business you describe would probably find it far more economical to do a shared hosting or managed dedicated server plan. In the case of shared hosting, the price points for MS hosting is generally not much different than UNIX hosting. If you're a joe who is tight on cash, I wouldn't be running my own box. It costs a fortune to get fiber dropped and buy the hardware in the first place.
So this "Web 2.0" thing: what precisely is it??
--
I am The Anonymous Coward. Fear my wrath.It's :
Web
Web 2.0 (never released)
Web 3.0
Web 3.1 (with cool new multimedia features, google will be bought up and bundled as part of this release)
Web 95 (This will be released on a new type of CD media)
Web 98 (This will try to fix some features and add usb support)
Web Me (more feature fixes to encourage the punters to handover some more cash for no real gain)
Web XP (a total rewite with true multitasking)
At some point IBM will realign its business no longer selling services, instead becoming a concept provider.
Soundproofing Acoustics noise
Zeldman might know a lot of stuff and make some pretty sites, but damn it, all he ever writes about is how his day was and how everyone around him is stupid.
...who's heard way more backlash against Web 2.0 hype than actual Web 2.0 hype?
Why on earth are we going from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 man? What happened to Web 1.1, hell, what happened to Web 1.11-r4 for that matter?
And what about nightly builds, a practice that has served M$ (and leak-boys) so well in the past???
self.confused
<before>now</before>
I don't see how it's gained "so much traction so quickly", it's been around for ages, just nobody bothered with it.
Get a handful of paperbacks from your shelf and look at their cover prices. Then check them out on Amazon. The chances are that significantly more than half of them are listed on Amazon at exactly that price, and those which are not are high-volume sales items and are typically only discounted by about 20-30%. Funny, huh? --Especially when Amazon's model should allow them to give at least a 40% discount on virtually EVERY book and still make a tidy profit. But that simply isn't how it is. Instead, Amazon engages in a common type of marketing which uses semantic tricks proven to give the average customer the impression that they are getting a good deal when they shop at a given outlet.
And there is absolutely no excuse for this.
Please remember, Amazon cannot be compared to other distributors because unlike other distributors, Amazon incurs NO shipping costs, maintains NO stock, and does NOT order in bulk. --These combined qualities pose a huge problem for a small or medium-sized publisher. Amazon should be skimming at most 10% of a cover price, which is the accepted and rational norm in the distribution game. But instead, they regularly take from 40% to 50%, and they do NOT pass a portion of that discount on to either retailer or customer.
I know these details from direct experience in dealing with Amazon as a publisher for more than a year, so I feel both justified and qualified to say it once again: Amazon does not play a fair game of ball.
-FL
and does NOT order in bulk.
They DO order in bulk--for books that will sell. Actually, Amazon is probably the only place a small publisher like you has a chance at all. Why in heaven's name would they want to buy from you in bulk? They know your self-published wonder book isn't going to sell. It would be stupid for them to buy in large quantity. Further, it is standard practice in the publishing industry for retailers to buy books from publishers with a "return" privilege. Let's say B.Dalton buys 100 copies of a title from you. They sit on their shelves for a few months and don't sell. They get rifled through; the spines get beat up; the covers get torn. But they don't sell, So B.Dalton packs them up and sends them back to you for a FULL refund. So would you rather sell books permanently or get them back in poor condition after you thought they were sold? Also, B.Dalton paid postage to get books BACK to you, but you paid to send them to B.Dalton, just as you would to Amazon.com. You idict Amazon for not buying in bulk. Why should they and get stuck with dead merchandise? It doesn't make business sense at all.
Amazon incurs NO shipping costs
So those books just wrap themselves in bubble-wrap and address themselves, then?
But instead, they regularly take from 40% to 50%, and they do NOT pass a portion of that discount on to either retailer or customer.
You're still claiming Amazon is skimming 40-50%, but the numbers simply do not add up. They only GET a 40-50% discount, they can't therefore also TAKE it. I couldn't find a paperback with LESS than a full 20% discount, so the idea that they don't pass ANY of their discount onto a consumer is simply not true. ANY major publishing house hardback is in the 40% or close category. For those books on Amazon that DO sell at full retail, it is the PUBLISHER that is giving Amazon what is called a "short discount" which means next to nothing (e.g. circa 10%). Further, cheaper the book, less the discount. It costs dollars to send an item, whether it retails for $4.95 or $40.95. The cost of touching that book is more or less standard. It makes sense to offer less of a discount for cheaper items. If they offered 40% for a $4.95 pmass market, they'd lose money on every sale. So your numbers simply do not add up. You are accusing Amazon of taking a much bigger mark-up than they actually do.
Now, as to the fact that Amazon does not pay shipping. First of all, what does that have to do with anything? Neither does any bookstore. But the consumer is getting the book mailed to his doorstep. Why shouldn't he pay for shipping? Of course he should. Second of all, Amazon very often DOES pay for shipping. I haven't paid ANY shipping with Amazon for probably three or four years. Anybody with any savvy does not need to either. So as to your complaint about shipping: a) So? and b) That is often simply not true.
maintains NO stock
A friend of mine worked for a Christmas season in one of their several major distribution warehouses. The books were stacked from floor to ceiling on two major levels. The "pickers" (my friend) would take an order and pull from the shelves to a conveyor belt. The orders were packed at the end of the belt. They had espresso stands on every level so employees could fuel up on free caffein. He said it was like a party. Minimum wage or close to it as I remember. You wouldn't want to make a career of it. But the fact is, they DO have warehouses and they DO stock product--just not maybe yours. "Just in time" shipping makes a lot of sense for stiock, like yours, that is likely questionable.
Amazon engages in a common type of marketing which uses semantic tricks proven to give the average customer the impression that they are getting a good deal when they shop at a given outlet.
I don't see it that way. Amazon doesn't have to pay $5,000 a month rent for a 3,000 square foot retail space in a mall. I don't have to drive there. I order a book and it gets here as fast as I want it to
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
They DO order in bulk--for books that will sell. Actually, Amazon is probably the only place a small publisher like you has a chance at all. Why in heaven's name would they want to buy from you in bulk? They know your self-published wonder book isn't going to sell. It would be stupid for them to buy in large quantity.
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First of all, my 'wonder book' is one of several which sell in the thousands of copies. Yes, I'm small press, but I've generated about a half million dollars in retail sales.
Second, my sales track record with Amazon over a one year association with them saw about 200 unit sales. Again, not a big deal, but big enough I would think to earn an average of more than 1 or 2 copies per book per purchase order. (P.O.'s which they sent almost weekly for a whole year.) For this they demanded a 50% discount. It would have made a lot more sense for them to order a whole case of books once every two months rather than annoy my shipping department with silly orders.
Now, as to the fact that Amazon does not pay shipping. First of all, what does that have to do with anything? Neither does any bookstore.
It makes all the difference! --And actually, bookstores DO pay for shipping. If they want to stock their shelves, they have to pay the truck driver like everybody else. Amazon, however, required me to ship books to their sorting plants on my dime. The math worked like this. .
On a 2 book purchase order, after giving a 50% discount, I grossed an average of about $12. Okay. Now, to ship those 2 books to Amazon via air mail, including packaging, it cost me around $10. --The price to print those two books was about $6, which leaves me in the hole to the tune of about $4 per order. This is why bulk discounts should only ever apply to bulk purchases. After a year of this nonsense, on sales which would normally have netted $800 or so, I ended up losing around $200. That's bad math!
--However because I paid to ship the books to Amazon, and because their customers paid to ship the books from Amazon. . , disregarding their sorting costs, Amazon made about $2000 from my work. I'm not inventing this. This is how it really works! I couldn't believe just how ridiculous Amazon was, when all the while, I was engaged in real and rational business deals with all my other distributors.
You see, every other book distributor I've ever dealt pays for shipping from me to them. Brodart Co., for instance, has a universal UPS account which it gives out to each publisher. I use this number to ship books to them, and they get the bill. If you have, as you say, worked in wholesale book sales, you would know that this kind of practice, or similar, is the industry standard. --And the distributor doesn't lose out, because they then charge the retailers and libraries who order from them to ship books the rest of the way along the chain. So in the end, the only people paying for the shipping are the end customers, which makes sense. Amazon, however, has somehow managed to put a hiccup in this practice without anybody even realizing it.
You're still claiming Amazon is skimming 40-50%, but the numbers simply do not add up. They only GET a 40-50% discount, they can't therefore also TAKE it. I couldn't find a paperback with LESS than a full 20% discount
Coraline by Neil Gaiman, Cover price, $5.99 Amazon price, $5.99
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, Cover price, $6.99 Amazon price, $6.99
Either way, they made out alright.
-FL