Social Computing and Badger's Paws

An anonymous reader writes "When Yahoo!'s Jeremy Zawodny recently asked What the heck is Web 2.0 anyway? he received a set of responses reminiscent of those garnered by The Register back in 2005, which famously concluded, based on its readers' responses, that Web 2.0 was made up of 12% badger's paws, 6% JavaScript worms, and 26% nothing. Nonetheless, as Social Computing (SoC) widens and deepens its footprint, another Jeremy — Jeremy Geelan — has asked if we are witnessing the death of 'Personal' Computing. SoC, Geelan notes, has already become an academic field of study. But perhaps Social Computing too is just badger's paws?"

Comments

We didn't even make the cut

[Glowing Fish]

http://www.xkcd.com/c256.html

Slashdot wasn't even on this map!

Re:web 2.0 is a buzz word

[MillionthMonkey]

At least, I don't know if I've ever heard anyone seriously using it. Most of the times I've heard it mentioned was people making fun of others for using the term.

Microsoft tried to get on this bus with their Windows Live Mail but they had to roll back to Web 1.0 because of the design flaws inherent in the way this whole "Web 2.0" paradigm is supposed to work. The idea is basically this- you get rid of the desktop application, and use a browser to implement functionality. That involves downloading lots of JavaScript code. People on dialup accounts simply did not have enough bandwidth to download a JavaScript version of Outlook into their browser on an HTTP request. This DHTML/CSS/JavaScript crap they set up in the 90s is really creaking under the load of the infrastructure being built on top of it with these Web 2.0 applications. I wonder how long it will be before something like Flash totally takes over everything.

And if you love that...

[cliveholloway]

I recommend these two, also by weebl. Magic.

The eternal quest for money

[Archtech]

The Internet used to be a geek's refuge - a place where adults exchanged views about important matters, and whiny people with emotional itches were noticeable by their absence. Another activity that was pretty rigorously excluded was "business" - defined (by me) as the attempt to earn the largest pile of money in the shortest time with the minimum effort, without being heavily punished by the criminal justice system. This blissful state of affairs still held good (more or less) when the sainted TBL invented the Web and gave it to us all without let, hindrance, or vig.

Pretty soon the Web grew and grew, and attracted the attention of those who perch, vulture-like, incessantly scanning the horizon for signs of free meals. How could they extract industrial quantities of money from this popular, but apparently useless phenomenon? The hunt was on, and an early burst of enthusiasm (the Dot Com era) led to general disappointment (the Dot Bomb crash).

But now there are more and more practical ways to make money from the Web, and those who find money more fascinating than technology, universal communication, planetary groupthink, etc., need a label to denote the Web in its capacity as a revenue stream. That is the essential meaning of "Web 2.0".