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."
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.
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
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!
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.
paid for the right to use "Web 2.0".
O'Reilly and CMP are having a row for the Web 2.0 trademark to be used in orgainizing events and conferences. I think Web 2.0 will probably fall into the public domain.
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.
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.
There will be no Web 3.0. Instead there will be Web 2.0-2.0, which will be known to the memeosphere as Web Squared. It'll be hip to be Squared.
KFG
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.
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."
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.
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.
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