« Thunderbird and Spam | Main | Google-AOL » Year-end #1: Web 2.0The year-end toptens and summary blusters are popping up, should I add to the noise? It's tempting to make a top ten list ('cause they're fun and they force you to pay attention to all the media that's piled up over the year... though I suppose it's odd for a web consultant to create a list of his top ten albums or films or books. The Austin Chronicle used to ask me to contribute top ten lists of technology stories for the year – since this year's been pretty rich where emerging technologies are concerned, I could do that again here. One important tech story in 2005 lives somewhere behind the buzzword "Web 2.0," a label that suggests we've taken web development to the next level, though for some it means that we're looking for a way to bring the investors back to the table, and that aspect of the story is so perilous that a backlash has developed among those who'd just as soon keep the secret ("Investors - move on, nothing to see here...") After all, money changes everything, and the code phrase for web+money in the 90s was irrational exuberance. The origins of Web 2.0, though, are in the months following the implosion of the Internet bubble. Web innovators and content developers wanted to keep doing what they'd been doing, and since there was no money in it, they reverted to the gift-economy thinking of earlier years in cyberspace, and developed technologies – and approaches to technology – that fed into Web 2.0. Part of the impetus for Web 2.0 was Tim Berners-Lee's concept of a semantic web, which is "an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation." Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly created the authoritative overview of Web 2.0, including several more or less related developments that have reached critical mass over the last year or so – but aren't new; e.g. "software as a service" has been around for a while as the "application service provider" (ASP) model, and what's new about the "long tail" is that it's acknowledged (via Chris Anderson's The problem with "Web 2.0" is that the term doesn't mean anything specific, and if you haven't read the O'Reilly piece, the reference would be meaningless in the same way that other too-vague, too-general buzzwords are meaningless. "Social software" is another example. I thought it was a good label when I first heard it, better than "virtual community" or "online social networks." However in the minds of many the term was not inclusive of earlier "social" technologies, like forums, chats, and email lists. "Social software" was generally taken as a label for blogs, wikis, social network platforms (like Friendster/Orkut) and syndication (RSS and Atom). Terms like "Web 2.0" and "social software" may be useful on some (very high) level, but when you're getting down to the nitty gritty of consulting and development, they're useless. You have to be very specific about goals and objectives, and the kinds of functionality that will be most effective in meeting them. If I was setting out to write a top ten list, I didn't get past the first item, but that's okay. I have three days to come up with more stuff. *8^) jon posted this at 11:11 AM |
read weblogsky! latest posts: |
