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."

Comments

what's

[iogan]

What's web 2.0?

Re:what's

[generic-man]

It's a lot like Web 1.0, but with JavaScript instead of Flash and RSS instead of RSS.

Consider a web site you visited 10 years ago. Now replace all the boring HTML with exciting AJAXified scriptaculosity!!

Also RSS is really important to Web 2.0, even though it's been around for 10 years and still has glaring flaws that remain unaddressed since that time. (How do I indicate something's been updated or deleted without triggering duplicate entries in everyone's feed reader?)

That's all well and good. . .

[igibo]

. . .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

start thinking about usability and design

[digitaldc]

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.

Re:start thinking about usability and design

[ladyKae]

But... Meetings are bad for you

Paul Graham

[torunforever]

Paul Graham's take on Web 2.0 is a good read.

More like 0.2 than 2.0

[Billosaur]

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.

Re:More like 0.2 than 2.0

[click2005]

"WWW:The Next Generation"... Aren't you a bit ahead of yourself there?

WWW : The Markup Protocol
WWW 2.0 The Wrath of Kazaa
WWW 3 The Search for Social Networks
WWW 4 The VRML Homepage
WWW 5 The Final Flickr
WWW 6 The Undocumented Context

then we get to WWW:TNG

Web 2.0: Where solutions don't need problems?

[germ!nation]

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)

Re:Web 2.0: Where solutions don't need problems?

[nahdude812]

AJAX? Why?

Well said. This is really the fundamental question present, isn't it? We've been doing it for a couple of years, before the "AJAX" term appeared. As a sidenote, I believe the reason this term took off so well is because the web had been naturally moving in this direction, a lot of bleeding edge developers felt it, knew it in their bones, but until that point, didn't have any term to latch onto. Like a chemical reaction where all the reagents are present in the right quantities but the catalyst is missing.

The answer of course depends on your business circumstances. Ajax isn't right for everyone, but because it's the current buzz word, you'll see a lot of abuses of ajax in the coming months. Sadly it'll detract from the elegance that the technology can lend users.

So anyway, to answer your question in a general fashion, it's got several advantages from traditional web development.
Most importantly, from a user perspective, a well thought out ajax application means a much more responsive interface, and really nothing else. If you expose anything else about ajax to your users, you're doing it wrong (IMHO). The snappiness comes from two aspects. First, asynchronous requests means that the user can keep working while something is processing in the background. Second, there's simply less data to transfer in a well thought out site, so the page itself downloads faster (though usually only on the 2nd and later hits since the first hit involves downloading a potentially sizy library).

Now this point should not be under-considered. From an evil marketing perspective, having a website where users can complete the ordering process in 7 seconds from search to receipt means more sales. Not because you can handle a higher volume (though that's another of ajax's benefits), but because users have less time to reconsider their purchase. Less opportunity to say, "Wonder if I'll find a better deal elsewhere," or, "Do I really want to spend $400 on a new camera when my old one actually does everything I need."

From a technical perspective, I see two main benefits in practice.
First, it represents lower server loads. Traditional web development means you have to rebuild every page every time the user clicks anything. The framework, the navigation, and the logic that goes into determining whether the user sees specific page elements, all has to be redone from scratch every page hit. That takes time and resources: memory to hold that page data on a buffered system, network bandwidth to transfer it, and cpu time to generate it. On a low volume site, this is meaningless. If you're serving 500-1000 hits a second though, this adds up. Of course in that case you're going to have load balancing, and money to throw at additional hardware.

However our work has shown about half the load on a heavily ajax based app from a traditional app, so that's fewer things to go wrong, fewer 2am calls because a hard disk crashed, and fewer hours spent troubleshooting why your edge optomized routing isn't optomizing its edge routing.

Also, from a development perspective, this is exactly the Model View Controller framework that so many people really like to enforce in their development practices. The roles are also clearly defined, since each role happens in a different location. No matter how many MVC frameworks I've worked in, it's always felt forced to me. You end up doing things in an odd and counter-intuitive way in order to pound your complex business logic (which invariably seems to affect display).

The biggest problem is that often business logic *is* the display. In the end, either you end up passing many dozens of flags to your display to affect these things (the correct way, but with more flags, becomes increasingly difficult to not make mistakes), you end up generating some of the display in the model portion (much easier, so lazy programmers will often take this route), or worst of all, you end up putting business logic in the displa

Re:Oh boy.

[MountainMan101]

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.

If you can't explain it in fifteen seconds...

[AEther141]

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.

Re:Screw that, I wrote about Web 4.0

[romiir]

Quote:
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.

Actually it's quite the opposite...

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.

Yes, from day 1, anyone could put up a simple webpage, but dynamic content, and truely meaningful webpages which can actually get some readers were reserved for only businesses with lots of money. Now today with opensource languages which are free to use, and operate on a free OS, you can run your own webserver with dynamic content for nearly free (the cost of your internet connection).

It is a way to get another bubble

[SmallFurryCreature]

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 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.