Slashdot Mirror
Web 2.0 As A New Wave of Innovation?
Vitaly Friedman writes "In his article in the recent Educause magazine, Bryan Alexander, Director for Research at the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE), presents a comprehensive analysis of the rising web 2.0 companies and describes the emerging of web 2.0. From the article: ' ... larger players have entered the field, most notably Yahoo, which has been buying up many projects, including Flickr and del.icio.us. Microsoft is considering a massive extension of RSS. And Google has been producing its own projects, such as the Lens RSS reader and Google Maps. Meanwhile, academic implementations are bubbling up, like the social bookmarking and search projects noted earlier. This Web 2.0 movement (or movements) may not supplant Web 1.0, but it has clearly transformed a significant swath of our networked information ecology.'"
'Web 2.0' is just a bunch of wikis and people pretending to be important right?
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Please switch to the new, open Web 2.1 Thank you.
I thought some company had recently trademarked the term Web 2.0? Isn't our discussion of this a blatant violation of corporate America's intellectual property rights?
I'm having nightmares already. Web 2 keeps "rising" like a friggin' zombie every few days.
It rised when people said Java applets were so Web 2, then it rised again when blogs and RSS was so Web 2, then it rised again when Google made JS interaction popular (again), a bit later it rised again when a marketing company coined the term for what Google does "AJAX", then again with Flickr, YouTube, Digg and so on, and I'm telling you I'm already sick of the damn Web 2.0.
Do you know what happens with too much buzz and hype? You let people down and make them sick up to their necks. I hate the damn Web 2.0 and have no idea what THE HECK it is anymore.
And I'm a web developer, let alone businessmen and the casual Internet surfer.
With twice the self importance of the original!
sulli
RTFJ.
You haven't paid us to use our Web 2.0 Trademark. Please remit what you feel is a correct fee to us here at ORA!!!
It will not be enought, but don't worry!, we will just sue you for the rest!
Web 2.0 As A New Wave of Innovation?
Dude, it's boom/bomb time again! Everyone get on the meaningless buzzword bandwagon! "Web 2.0" man - the old rules don't apply any more!! Quick, buy everything in sight that claims to use "Web 2.0", whatever the hell THAT means this week! Let's see if we can get the Nasdaq up to 20,000 this time before we raze and burn the entire tech industry back into 1985! AWESOME!
Someone call the venture capitalists!!
"Microsoft is considering a massive extension of RSS"
Listen to the sound of my voice. Inhale deeply, put your arms in a circle and say "Embraaaace", then exhale slowly pushing your arms out and say "Exteeeend".
'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
I've moved on to Web 3.0.
It's all goes downhill once we reach Web 98.
...how much crap can they pile onto what was designed as document viewer before the whole thing implodes?
Give the browser a break people! It's seen enough abuse!
I coral cached a wayback page a while ago, does that count as web 2.0ish? ;)
Shh.
Speaking as a 'real software engineer' who writes 'real software', web developers have always been looked down upon has untalented hacks. I think with the Web maturing as an application platform we are seeing quite a bit of indignant snobbery from traditional engineers.
Although I still use my traditional desktop for heavy duty computational tasks in the graphics/physics area, I have been noticing that I feel the need for a traditional desktop less and less each month as Web applications keep getting better and better. I can certainly see myself relegating my workstation to only my specific work tasks and almost all of the rest of my daily computing tasks being done through cellphones/PDAs/PSPs outside/on the road and at with web browsers in my living room on my PS3.
Go try out some Web 2.0 tutorials(or whatever you want to call the set of technologies) to see for yourself. Despite the hype there is some serious good stuff going on.
Making the link between this and my views on Web 2.0 As A New Wave of Innovation is a task left to the reader. No points will be awarded for answering this question.
once we all start working off the web murphy will make someone forget to replace the battery and the next thing we know it'll be jan 1st,1980
As a real end user, I can tell the web world of developers that untill you can get programming down as a genuine science rather than this witchcraft spells of coding and hype for sale.... Murphy loves you, yes he does. So don't make those of us who really honestly know better suffer more, buy selling your babeling BS to the stupid masses and that we unfortunately would then have no reasonable way to avoid on the internet.
No Web 2.0 comments section is complete without a link to the classic Web 2.0 beatdown that El Reg ran last year. Love that tag cloud.
Whatever it is Web 2.0 is made of, John Battelle will have an ad running on it someplace.
seeing that nobody knows what it means yet.
paid for the right to use "Web 2.0".
IT and specifically web development is so big that a big chunk of the "techies" are now idiots. It started when the business guys who could hack HTML started calling themselves geeks, but the journey ends here.
This Web 2.0 movement (or movements) may not supplant Web 1.0
I remember PHBs saying equally ridiculous things about XML when it came out, how it would revolutionize the world and everything would magically talk to each other. Now we see people in all groups saying the same thing about 6 year old tech... oh, I mean, Web 2.0
So, um, can anyone tell me how HTML, JavaScript, and Stylesheets supplants, um...., HTML, JavaScript, and Stylesheets?
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
It's as stupid in its way as people "discovering" the Internet a few years ago. In their haste to stake claims all over it, they neglected to notice that it was actually a set of artifacts created, with considerable effort, by people who came before them.
And didn't we hear this once already with something called Web Services? Let's transport everything over Port 80, that's really innovative. If we must call it anything, let's call it Hubris 2.0. Maybe, like Madonna, it will eventually go away if we just ignore it.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
"Microsoft is considering a massive extension of RSS. "
Let me guess, this will be a new Windows-only binary format that will have the ability to execute code.
Dear Microsoft,
Please keep in mind that that middle "S" stands for "simple".
-- My Weblog.
"Bubble 2.0," anyone?
Slammer already demonstrated how you could not depend upon bandwidth on the Internet to be always available. For a business, it's critical.
Now, the business might be moving to internal web servers and apps
But
The technologies are becoming more stable and ubiquitous. But they aren't "new". JavaScript is still JavaScript. Making it asynchronous is good and useful, but it isn't new and it isn't changing anything that wasn't already discussed, planned and in production.
We're getting back to the "thin client" model that was pushed more than a decade ago.
The current interweb, good though it is, is a difficult marketplace. It wasn't created for online business to utilise properly.
Web 2.0, being a new start (sort of), means that business will be better able to utilise it. This is an important thing.
You could say 'corporations are bad', and well, they are. Corporations are not the only fruit though, I bet that more than a few slashdot readers would like a web that they could better utilise to make money.
You know the other week when we were all down with O'Reilly trying to patent/copyright/whatever "Web 2.0", well, perhaps they were just trying to save us from all this hype over nothing. I mean, if we had just accepted that "Web 2.0" was now owned by O'Reilly and we couldn't even mention it's name, we'd be free of TFA. All of them. Whilst, in every other sense, the web would develop as it is now. We just wouldn't be subjected to all this articles _about_ Web 2.0!!
:D
All hail O'Reilly -- they tried to save us but we wouldn't listen!
Web 2.0: even more porn!
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
To stop corporations from stealing content from the masses.
This "organization" sounds fishy. Who are these guys?
Funny that Web 2.0 is taking off so much. The problem with it is that everyone I interview is now "learning" Ajax. I feel like if I go to an interview I'll be asked a million Ajax questions, that I really don't want to answer.
:)
Using hidden Iframes and JScript was one way to do what Ajax does years ago. There are definately a few cases where it is really useful. A little div popup, pre-populating city state after a postal code was entered, testing a value etc. Debugging is much harder, and the Javascript/DOM model is hard to code bug free. Javascript errors don't get reported to the server admin, and they are often hard to replicate. This is partly a lack of good tools, but view source on HTML is almost always easier then trying to step thru some buggy jscript.
It can be very easy to abuse Ajax. I recently had someone show me a search example that "pre-populated" as you typed. It was super clunky and really didn't work. Ajax's biggest problem at this point is that everyone thinksd everything has to be instant now. You can make a user go to another page to edit something that is not edited every other minute.
As much as I love Google maps, Yahoo Flash maps kick their ass. Adobe's new Flex tech is really going to give Ajax a run for the money. Java is just to sluggish, but Flash is pretty quick. Yes you'll have to turn off your flash ad blockers.
The thing that has to happen is that SVG or a new standard needs to be born to handle GUI apps. People don't like flash because there is a name behind it, HTML is a standard, Javascript is a standard, etc. Java is Sun/IBM, Flash is Adobe ( formally Macromedia ).
Personally I would love to see an HTML 5.0....A pure XML based HTML is great, but pretty impractical given the huge amount of content that doesn't have the
tag, and just have
tags, etc. WTH did no one think to have a tag? Now I'm stuck with a million different Javascript/UL combos out there. Even adding a target to div would be great. Imagine a that would turn on a div and tell the browser to turn it on. With some style sheet properties you could make some powerful divs without code.
I guess my biggest gripe with Web 2.0 is that almost everything that we spend hours figuring out in JScript could be done if people would create more and better HTML tags. Then the browser developers take care of all the testing, and we will have more stable apps.
Personally I'm going down the Flash path. If you haven't tried Flex yet, labs.adobe.com, do yourself a favor and see what you've been missing....no I don't work for Adboe or even really like them
You can do more in less time, and you can create content that really looks good. I'd love to see a Flex slashdot version.
Calling it 2.0 implies that there has been a change in the underlying protocols; however, people will always just call it "the web" as long as we continue to use HTTP on TCP/80 and HTTPS on TCP/443 (* though even that's a bad definition, since there are a lot of sites that serve Web 1.0 content as HTTP on TCP/8080 or some other proxied port).
If you want to call something Web 2.0, pick a new port and design a new open protocol. If a critical mass of people start using it, then you can call it Web 2.0. Until then, let's stop stroking these peoples' egos by calling it Web 2.0 instead of what it really is: Web 1.x.
p.s. Personally I'm of the opinion that the current generation of "Web 2.0" is really more like "Web 1.0.2003 BETA".
Microsoft is considering a massive extension of RSS.
For some strange reason, that statement sends shivers down my spine.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Yeah. The whole thing is ridiculous. I'm just an extremist nutjob, but the whole Hype, Ululation, and Propoganda (HUP) concerning XML / Web 2.0 / "Object Oriented Databases" / etc / etc / and of course etc, just drives me nuts. Are my fellow geeks, who are otherwise rational and intelligent, so blind to the stupid slogans of the marketing machine?
XML isn't a bad idea, for instance-- it gives a standard method of defining data transport, for instance. But it doesn't relieve each application of the responsibility of understanding the schema, like the hype machine would have had you believe.
Web 2.0 is just a stupid name for a bunch of concepts and techniques already in use by the people who understand them. There's nothing new, nothing "innovative" (what a useless fucking word). In most cases, it's used where it isn't needed, and makes the application harder to use, understand, program, and debug. Instead of breaking tasks down into little steps (important on the web, because people might not use your application every day, so simplicity beats efficiency), web designers now want to cram every little feature into a single page, as if it's an application that's used daily.
Anyway.
"Geeks" are sounding more and more like PHBs every year. I guess too many of them have drunk the Kool-Aide.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Confused about what Web 2.0 is? So was I, but now I got what Web 2.0(tm) really is.
First of all, it all started with some company I can't remember the name of invented a stupid name that sounded like a soup brand for the hack that another company.
Then out of nowhere websites with names like "raggot" and "dorkr" are all the rage. They all feature the following:
* Pastel colors
* Rounded boxes
* Fade-in/fade-out Javascript events
* At least 16 different stylesheets per page
* The ability to let users socially mess up the categorization of data with random strings of characters (called "tags")
And suddenly, the 90s are back. Time to get ready for the IPO party people. Except it's not an IPO party anymore, it's being bought by Yahoo!
Web 2.0 is like the Vi1agra emails I get in my inbox. Economy 101 in the world of spam.
Live of the one percent of morons who think the web today is anything more than ten year old technology plus more bandwidth.
RSS, Flikr, Google Maps, AJAX, Video sites... equals bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth and bandwidth.
Nothing is new.. Nothing.
Read the specs.. nada, zilch, 0 is fresh, working and available in popular web browsers.
Why ? Because innovation has been replaced by the DMCA and the US patent system.
An economy based on IP and DRM is like the one based on Opium and Gunships.
One day "Designed by Apple in California" becomes "Designed by ChinaCorp in Beijing" and then the US economy is in real trouble.
I was just telling a friend how 90% of "innovation" in the computer industry just consists of taking some old concept and giving it a new name and/or implementation, thus allowing another generation of practitioners to avoid having to actually learn anything, or see the fundamentals beyond the implementation details.
After 20 years in the field, I've seen it over and over again. I start to realize why so many older techies are so damn bitter.
For the record, my personal "ax to grind" is data management: first we had hierarchical databases, then network, then SQL, then network again (but now it's "object"), and finally hierarchical (now called "XML"). Completely ignoring the single model that encompasses all of them. But I digress...
Like a lot of this taxonomy, I'm NOT SURE WHAT WEB 2.0 IS EXACTLY. However, the main points seem to be:
1) use of Ajax in your app's primary interface so that it works more like a "regular" desktop app.
2) giving your app a second interface which is "well-documented" (so the app can be automated). For example, an XML-RPC API.
3) Avoiding complexity.
4) Using certain fonts and graphical design.
#1 is definitely nothing new. Graphical network apps have been around since X11 at least. Of course in many cases I prefer a well-designed Ajaxy app to one that has to reload all the time, so this is generally a good thing for web apps. However, I repeat, it's NOTHING INNOVATIVE, unless you're looking exclusively at the universe of web apps.
#2.. well, you know, to me there is NO LOGICAL DIFFERENCE between documented, easily-parsed HTML and intuitive URLs, vs. an XML-RPC interface. In other words, they could just be combined into one API that can be used by both humans and machines. Though I can understand how using Ajax would complexify the HTML interface to the point were it's better to create a new API.
Side note: in coding against some "web 2.0" apps, I have to resort to screen-scraping anyway, because they leave out data from the XML-RPC interface. But then they fall out of sync sometimes, it seems.
#3 this is a bit of a lie, since the total system from the silicon on up is MUCH more complex than before. And the Javascript/HTML/Ajax stuff is a nightmare of complexity, though for some reason people have convinced themselves that it isn't.
#4, yeah, somewhat tongue in cheek, but haven't you noticed that everything that's "Web 2.0" seems to have a certain "look and feel", which of course means nothing from a logical, fundamental point of view, but it's there.
So, I'd have to disagree, Web 2.0 is just another wave of new terminology, half-baked concepts, and the occasional step backward. Plus the usual lack of precision and reliability. Just like we get every 5-10 years in this industry.
I wonder why all this new hype is not called BBS 2.0 ?
I mean it's the same idea -- microcontent posted by participants of particular service (be it pictures, stories, daily updates), just done through the browser. Yes, it's easier to ask for money for snazzy new abbreviation, and it improves feeling of self-worthieness.
"We need to improve our Wiki presence in Web 2.0 and expand RSS feeds to all departments" sounds so much better than "Our documentation should be easy to use and all departments have to post their news on the web regularly". And probably would get a budget.
*sigh* Nothing but hype
Hyperom.com
You're just making O'Reilly's franchise more valuable.
Ask any web developer, and they'll tell you that Web 2.0 means nothing more to them than a bunch of mis-jargons used for greedy marketing tactics, by greedy web sales guys who drink way to much coffee and read way to many blogs.
I've watched how the sales guys @ my old co. were spinning the hype to customers, with all the same old promises (overflated promises 2.0), and same old inefficiencies (due to 'we have to roll this out and sell it before the next guy does' etc.) *yawn*
The only good to come out of it all, is that IT shops that have enough budgeting, can (justifiably) seperate the tasks between client-side and server-side development (if they haven't already), so people who currently do both, can have some room to focus on one or the other. Unfortunately, not all companies are structured in such a manor. =/
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
"Do you know what happens with too much buzz and hype? You let people down and make them sick up to their necks. I hate the damn Web 2.0 and have no idea what THE HECK it is anymore."
Don't worry about it, suv4x4. Your counterpart in India understands it perfectly, and is coding it as we speak. And if he/she doesn't, then the guys in China will. That's the nice thing about new technology, and the labour marketplace. If you don't, I will. Have a nice day.
So... does this explain why Slashdot's Light Mode now looks even shittier?
What 'witchcraft spells' are you talking about? As far as I can tell web development is simply an application of several standard technologies such as http, html, css, and ecma-232. /confused
It's a horrible, overcomplicated kludge that creates more problems than it solves. The sole reason why it exists, is because there's no single, widely adopted standard that would enable rich, extensible UI on the client and seamless interop with the server. There are two reasons why there's no such standard:
1. Microsoft doesn't want the web to enable something that will threaten its monopoly in OS and Office software.
2. Existing (and upcoming) standards are broken for two reasons: a). Microsoft XAML (which could solve the problem beautifully) is not cross-platform, and XUL doesn't truly solve the problems - it still needs binary extensions to do anything meaningful and they aren't cross platform either.
Quite frankly, for something like Flickr, I wouldn't mind running a client app as long as there's an easy, reliable way of updating it (like what's implemented in Firefox - binary diffs). That app, however, must run on three platforms in order to work for me, because I use Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.
Whenever I read the phrase "Web 2.0," I wonder what ever happened to Jon Katz.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Looks like slashdot just went web 2.0. what fun!
today is spelling optional day.
It would be typical with a forum full of engineers to simply pass up web 2.0 as some marketing buzzword for a new implementation of something old. In many ways the attributes associated with what is being collectively called 'web 2.0' are simply old ideas implemented in a medium where they can succeed in a big way.
It's important to understand that the difference in the web is not in the implementation but in the experience of the end user and how content is created, managed, and distributed. Adaptive path has a writeup about this at http://adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archiv es/000547.php
The difference is important because it changes how developers and designers percieve the web when they are creating new things. There are many features of newer web software that contribute to the ways in which people use and experience the web.
My favorite is the preference in designing software for the long tail. Which is mentioned in Wired http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html
This is the practice of serving many niche markets with targeted software instead of building software to service all of the market and doing it badly. This causes less confusion, less clutter, better software and faster turnaround.
Some of the other features of the newer web software you might have already noticed are decentralization, remixability, co-creation, and their side-effect of emergent systems. Web services, niche software and the network effect all make these things much more feasible than they have been in the past since there are well defined frameworks for distributing services that are easy to work with and adding more niche services increases the value of all web software by a large amount.
Notice I didn't say AJAX or Ruby on Rails or Django or [insert your new framework or technology here]. These are merely details of implementation. If a framework makes your company faster then that's good. If a technology lets your user's client fetch web service data for them, that can also be good. These things are only technologies used to reach an end product. Web 2.0 could have been done in many languages and frameworks and on many platforms. That's not to say that certain languages, frameworks, etc. didn't have an effect on the design of the software, as any language or framework has a certain effect on the overall style of the developers using it.
This was about a need for developers and designers to move beyond what was status quo for interaction between websites and their users. They are taking full advantage of the tools they have created and the network that was built up over the past few decades. To belittle their efforts into something meaningless is to surely miss the entire point.
I hope this Web 2 thing brings real GUI widgets, such as editable grids that don't have the Java applet quirks, outline/tree browsers, combo boxes, etc. All the stuff that we had in the mid 90's with VB/Delphi/PB/FoxPro and we thought would never ever go away until HTML-browsers tried to do the same stuff except that it took 7 times more coding and 3 times more pages and was still clunky. I just hope it is not tied to any one programming language or paradigm.
Bring me real widgets, and Web 2.0 gets to be more than just hype. Deal?
Table-ized A.I.
Web 2.x is soo yesterday. You really should opt for Web 3.11 for Workgroups: Blink-attributes for headings, Matrix-style marquee for paragraphs, and of course, all images automatically converted to animated gifs. And NO SHITTY CSS, just pretty font tags and lots of nice nested tables. It's like, well, Wheee!
PS. This new CSS on /. is awesome :)
They must be tiny little fellers.
Just because a browser can do lots of stuff doesn't mean its the best way to do it. A browser is perfect for presenting documents, simple input forms, and downloading real clients to do more complicated stuff.
...despite their efforts to show everybody how important they are they manage to get a few good things done. Since they're trying to show off, every once in a while a tooper stumbles over a rock and invents a useful new web mechanism.
Folks who use Google Maps don't know or care what's powering it, so if it takes pretense or puffery to get real work done, that's OK with me.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
As a blogger, I beg to differ - it's built the "industry".
Blog will probably be a word from 2006 that sticks around in 40 years. A "newspaper" could become a "newsblog" in rather short order.
Oh You POS
It controls 90% of the client OS market and 85% of the browser market, that's what. Any initiative is not going anywhere if it's not supported by Microsoft. OTOH, the remaining 15% of the browser market guarantee that any non-cross platform initiative is not going anywhere either. It's a tough balance of powers and it's unfortunate that Microsoft has a monopoly. There won't be any common standard until the ridiculousness of all this XML/AJAX/HTML/CSS2 crap becomes blindingly obvious to everybody. And that ain't happening right now.
It's not like I'm against web. Web is a fine publishing medium. It's just that browser is a piss poor platform for apps, and all this AJAX stuff isn't really making things any easier.
I agree with most of the people on here saying the whole Web 2.0 is just more buzz, hype, fizz. It's like somebody is trying to add some mentos to the Diet Web 1.0 :)
:) But the XmlHTTPObject is the start IMO of ways to better utilize the browser for client purposes.
However, and there's the 'but', Let's not forget how 'the web' (to me at least) was always kind of 'Internet 2.0'. There was archie, Veronica, USEnet, ftp, IRC, etc. etc. Who needed something that did all that sort of functionality but then in one big, fat, resource hog 'browser'. At some point there was so much 'web' or HTTP traffic that my internet link started to see really slow, nearly making some interactive sessions to remote sites impossible.
But business and PHB's responded to the hype by making the network faster, MUCH faster. A hype generates activity, activity generates results. So that's one (debatable, I know) reason why the Web 2.0 babbles arent all bad.
The other, far more important reason why Web 2.0 is defendable is because it creates the possibility to creates fat clients within the browser. Now there's some auto search thingies, some realtime edit stuff and what have you that's always posted as 'examples' of Web 2.0. Bogus
Do people think it's cool to diss a new technology with x, y and z reasons?
It has a place for use and it doesn't in another place.
Too bad people has their mind stuck with what they already see on the current web and sort of satisfied with this poorest web interface.
Those people who do not wish for new environments and people without mind to come up with something new, are the all posters here?
Hopefully I can make something soon out of this so much dissed technology.
Forums/Boards/BBS 2.0 already exists.. ;)
http://www.boardtracker.com
Contains 'web 2.0', no digg. Eeer... wait.
There are way too many "Web 2.0 sucks and I hate it, but I don't know what it is and I don't care" posts... Ignore it all you want, it isn't going anywhere and it will only make you more replaceable. People dismissed the web in the early 90s, it didn't go anywhere it only made all those novell certified engineers obsolete...
This article is a little old now, and it's not particularly targeted for the Slashdot audience: it's an insightful analysis of Web 2.0, I think, but in large part I think it's a summary aimed at the non-Slashdot crowd in institutes of higher education to make them aware of this movement and what impact it might have on learning.
So I've seen plenty of comments on a general debate of Web 2.0 -- but regarding the actual article (*gasp*), does anyone have any thoughts on the use of Web 2.0 (however that might be defined) in higher education? Having just graduated from Amherst College, I know it's something we've been talking a lot about (how can, for example, blogs and wikis be used to further collaboration outside of class?) but it's also something we're very behind on. (I don't know how other colleges and universities are handling it, but it seems that it hasn't really been fully embraced.) How have you seen Web 2.0 technologies used at colleges and universities? How do you think they could or should be used?
I know a couple people (myself included) who experimented with using blogs to document their progress on, and solicit feedback for, their theses, and I've heard of classes using wikis or other such community websites to combine their research on a particular topic. But I'm curious what else Slashdot has run into.
So so, someone tagged the whole web as "2.0" in the worldwide global CVS-REPO! I guess that repo is not the Wayback Machine (that's too spotty and doesn't maintain the whole revision history of the Web since gopher/veronica)...
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
I find it a little disturbing that this mess of Javascript and HTML is referred to as "innovation". Web 2.0 really is little more than what RPC, DisplayPostscript, NeWS, X11, or Java promised to deliver in the past. There are some good things about it: Web 2.0 is text-based protocols (UNIX influence), it's more open, and it's easier to throw together something in it than in previous standards. On the other hand, Web 2.0 is also a big mess: HTML, DOM, and JavaScript have bloated out of any proportion to the very limited funcitonality they actually provide.
HTML 5 is currently the spec. being worked on by WHATWG. You can read more about it courtesy of Anne van Kesteren.
Just a bunch of left over businesses that survived the initial dot com bust trying to look sexy enough to get vulture capitalist throw money at them like it was 1999 all over again.
:)
Let's party like it's 1999!
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
// web 2.0 by stridebird
// are we going to upversion the web everytime we get a handy new browser object?
if (window.XMLHttpRequest) {
alltheyhype = new XMLHttpRequest();
} else if (window.ActiveXObject) {
alltheyhype = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
}
Even Microsoft cringes at the possibility of shutting off 10-15% of the users from using their services (they do it anyway, for cost reasons, in some cases). What I'm saying is that if something doesn't come "in the box" with Windows, online services are not going to be enthusiastic about it because chances are this stuff is not on the client's computer. Look at .NET Framework, for example. Did you know it's possible to write great, secure applets in it with practically unlimited functionality? Microsoft even writes such applets for internal use. Why don't we see such applets outside Microsoft? For three reasons: .NET Framework does not come with Windows .NET Framework is not a "critical" update at Windows Update
1.
2.
3. Those pesky remaining 15% of users running on platforms other than windows and/or browsers other than IE (but this wouldn't be much of an issue to at least Microsoft itself if it wasn't for #1 and #2)
Back in the days of DOS applications, everyone had to roll their own UI because DOS wasn't going to do it for them. MS-DOS Editor used a completely different UI style to WordPerfect, which was completely different again to Neopaint. Every developer had to re-invent the UI wheel because the underlying API was so primitive.
We've come on in leaps and bounds since then. Operating systems provide complicated widgets like tree views as standard, and applications generally have lots of things in common with one another as a result of using the same underlying components. Web application development seems like a big step backwards, as everyone is once again rolling their own support for basic things like drag and drop, expandable tree views, colour pickers...
There are some handy libraries out there that can cut out some of the work, but it's no substitute for the functionality being provided by the platform itself: every site is inconsistent with every other site, and every site that uses these outside libraries carries around with it a glut of extra code that must be downloaded by every user. XUL was a good attempt at providing a more application-centered markup language, but it's suffered from poor separation from Mozilla's guts, making it hard to implement compatibly elsewhere. However, I'd love to see good support for XBL so that at least our home-rolled widgets can be packaged up nicely into bindings, separating the content from the functionality. It'd be nice if we could have some of the good bits of XUL's layout model in CSS too; CSS is far too centred around presentation of text-based documents but isn't so hot for application interfaces.
I'll abstain from calling "Web 2.0" innovation until we get to the point where everyone isn't busy reinventing two decades of platform and UI design.
Web 2.0 is hype created by people who don't program and don't build web applications. For those of us who do actually build things, nothing in 'Web 2.0' is all that amazing. I recall in the early 90's what many of us thought the internet would become: a virtual world, where people could take classes in virt reality (not just online, but sitting in a virtual classroom), take a walk in Paris in virt reality to plan a trip or study France, attend a meeting in Sri Lanka via some form of 'Star Wars Jedi Council' hologram projection and watch any movie or show we wanted, anytime, from anywhere.
The idea that I would be amazed that kids can post a blog on MySpace and that Wikipedia is interactive is laughable. You want me to be amazed? Invent the teleporter. That, I'll call new technology. Web 2.0? Please. Web 2.0 is what will happen if Net Nuetrality fails. THAT will be a whole new web, where nobody but corporations with deep pockets can create web sites. THAT would be a real 'Web 2.0'. Then if programmers decided to create a new web to subvert the corporate one, THAT would be yet another web. Creating a forum or allowing users to post blogs isn't a new web.
I mean, web 2.0. what ever.
.. >> i don't know what's the saddest here. normal people starting to act like nerds and living their lives online, or did i start the internet too soon, and at 23 i'm just too oldschool ?
... blogs. they're all posting news they read on ... blogs. i've surprised myself clickin on blogs posts and links, and after 7 or 8 clicks i was still reading a blog news about that thing the first one was talking about ... but didnt get to the source story yet ... i wonder if there is a source story anyway ..
....
rss >> i don't wanna go to the website, i wanna read the title of the news first, then i will decide if it's worth opening the page, waiting 3.5 seconds for it to load, and actually read the goddamn thing.
blogs >> giving a voice to the stupid, the ulgy, the stupid. I remember days when only the smart ones and the ones who knew were allowed to speak online. i was 12 then.
flickr, youtube, fakebook
blogoshpere >> is it just me or do blogs talk about
ajax >> cause loading a page is so long. did they hear about flash ? yeah javascript is waht we need
basically, i see the web just closing on itself. everything goes on this path now. bookmarks online, share this, share that, you found a funny video that's great, the internet used to be a window on the real world, now it's just a window on itself, sad thing, the internet sucks and there is nothing in there.
[chinese democracy starts now
There gonna be no web 2.0 if the telcos, RIAA, MPAA, patent trolls mess up net neutrality, freedom of speech, innovation, easy accessibility first.
Read radical news here
I thought it was all rounded corners, pastel colors, and Arial font... there's more?
One of the many things I hate. thingsihate.org
Version 2.1 updates for Web, Wave and Innovation have just been released as a single service pack! MAJOR bugs were squashed.
The bits on the bus go on and off... on and off... on and off...
XML isn't a bad idea, for instance-- it gives a standard method of defining data transport, for instance.
I've been wondering whether XML is really all that great of an idea. It makes sense to use it when, as you say, you need a standard way of representing data across multiple dissimilar systems. But a key notion behind XML is that unless an XML dataset is well-formed, attempts to parse that XML should fail.
This means XML makes sense to use when you need to represent data across multiple dissimilar systems, and you have control over the formation of datasets. Otherwise, if one system generates imperfectly formed XML, the whole system of systems grinds to a halt. Therefore, you either need sufficient control over all sources of data to be able to fix the way the data representation is generated, or you need to only use bug-free software.
If you have sufficient control over the way data is represented to be able to fix it when it misgenerates the XML, then you don't really need XML, and can instead choose a data representation more appropriate for your needs -- something that doesn't bloat your data out to 5x its original size, and doesn't require you to parse N records before you can parse out the N+1'th record, and doesn't require you to throw out an entire dataset if there is a problem with some part of it (which is like refusing to extract any files from a tarball if the last record in the tarball is truncated (if this hasn't happened to you yet, just wait, it will! and then you'll be glad that tar will extract all the files it can)).
If your system only uses bug-free software, and is sufficiently complex to do something useful, .. I don't know, I'll buy you a drink or something. Congradulations, you're ahead of the rest of us.
That having been said, there certainly seem to be a lot of people out there who are perfectly happy using XML. Maybe my experiences with it have just been unusually bad, or maybe those people don't mind XML's drawbacks. It's been my experience that representation errors are common (and sometimes what an XML parser considers a representation error is actually a desirable feature), and that software is more useful when it proceeds despite adverse conditions, when it can. But my mind is not closed on the subject. There may be something I'm missing, and I don't want to miss it if life throws it at me.
As for web 2.0 as a whole, I see a more complex picture. Yes, it's been unduly hyped, but it's also putting a label on a body of concepts with which the industry is trying to come to terms. There's a vague notion that dynamic web services which share information across contexts can be good, but the why and when of it is still unclear. I do not fault those who try to make more sense of it. Fault lies with those who focus unduly on the tools people have used thusfar to create useful services (Javascript, XML, PHP, Python, etc), to the neglect of the reasons those services have been useful (which are partly technological, but mostly social). I suspect the missing piece is something very simple, like "develop services which satisfy an existing need", but time will tell.
-- TTK
Careful: Flash is annoying to many users due to all the adverts that expoit it, and has been a considerable security risk. Between those two reasons, many people outright disable it, at least by default. Furthermore, navigation in Flash pages can be annoying; people have a tendency to hit the Back button, which instead of taking you to the page you were just viewing might navigate you out of the domain or, at the very least, require you to wait while another Flash app loads. Never forget your non-broadband users... Gmail and Yahoo! mail beta are quite usable on dialup, but a lot of Flash content will just hog the lines, in return for an interface that doesn't tell you what page you're about to go to and won't let you open it in a new tab. Finally, consider cross-platform: Flash player is prorietary binary code. Last I checked (my SuSE box is a few feet from here) there was no version of Flash player 8 for Linux yet, let alone an open-source alternative for those who need to compile for exotic systems or just don't like proprietary.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...