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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."
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!
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!
Slashdot should jump the bandwagon and incorporate Web 4.0
(its just like Web 2.0 but duped)
liqbase
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.
Web 3.0 is for Fedora fan-boys. Debian users will continue with Web 1.0 (or rather 1.1), which has the same interface as 1.0 but all of the security fixes of 2.0 backported.
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."
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.
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!).
For more information, click here.
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.
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!
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.
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
He's well known among web designers who work with modern web standards, for a couple of reasons:
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.
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.
Isn't XML the CSV of Y2K?
tone
tone
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!
--OR--
From the article:
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
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.
...who's heard way more backlash against Web 2.0 hype than actual Web 2.0 hype?