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.
"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.
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'?
"Bubble 2.0," anyone?
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 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.