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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.'"
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.
Nope. 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. While a lot of neat technologies and applications had popped up over recent years, I think 'Web 2.0' is more of a marketing term than anything else.
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!
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.
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.
I'm going to take the completely opposite opinion of everyone here:
"web 2.0" is a great buzzword. why? it describes something legitimate -- the confusing rush of new internet ideas from the past few years, and it's ugly as sin.
good buzzwords should hurt to say. "blog" is a great buzzword. it won't be in the english language in 30 years, except to talk about this time. it's just too hideous of a word. "morph" on the other hand, is going to fucking stick around for ever. it's just passable enough, and just generic enough to enter into common usage, and it just rots away at the beautiful and giant beast that is english.
i'll accept the reality that most of our new words are coming from technology and marketing, but let's pick neologisms that won't outlive their usefulness, and take the place of perfectly good old words that rolled into the language over the tongues of centuries of farmers and poets, not 15 minutes in a meeting before lunch.
and yes, it's funny i have some spelling errors in this post, i'm tired and my contacts are out, shut up.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
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