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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."
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.
...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!
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.