So, now, I'm working using AJAX using ruby and prototype and have become a big fan of RESTful
interfaces. All of these technologies use the basic HTTP building blocks. The HTTP error codes are useful, GET vs. POST vs. DELETE is useful. It's all useful. So reading an interview with Sir Tim Berners-Lee of "I invented the web" fame he says some interesting things:
LANINGHAM: "You know, with Web 2.0, a common explanation out there is Web 1.0 was about connecting computers and making information available; and Web 2 is about connecting people and facilitating new kinds of collaboration. Is that how you see Web 2.0?"
BERNERS-LEE: "Totally not. Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along."
So ... really... from a technical point of view, I offer this definition of "Web 2.0":"And in fact, you know, this Web 2.0, quote, it means using the standards which have been produced by all these people working on Web 1.0. It means using the document object model, it means for HTML and SCG and so on, it's using HTTP, so it's building stuff using the Web standards, plus Java script of course.
So Web 2.0 for some people it means moving some of the thinking client side so making it more immediate, but the idea of the Web as interaction between people is really what the Web is. That was what it was designed to be as a collaborative space where people can interact."
The era when both an open source browser lives up to the web standards and Microsoft isn't screwing it up too badly so people can actually make stuff.
4 comments:
I know the definition of Web 2.0 is controversial, but I think sites like Digg, Flickr, and Wikipedia are in a class of their own and are so markedly different from the early web that they merit a different classification. Users are not just connected to each other; user contributions are driving the site's content, not just one lone webmaster.
Would it be too much to ask you guys to post an "About Us" page?
I think of Web 2.0 as the transition from needing to be techy to interact with the web (ie, you need to know html to publish a web page/site) to not needing to be techy (ie, you can have a blog if you can type and use a basic UI). It's like we moved from printing presses to desktop publishing. Liberation! The tools of communication, out of the hands of the rivileged few and into the hands of the masses! The Bible in the vernacular! Personal freedom! Whoo hoo! Sorry, I was getting sort of carried away there. But I think you know what I mean.
From my perspective, which is not at all technical, it is a shift to the multi-directionality of information, ideas, creativity, etc. B-to-B and B-to-C imply linear movement in a single direction. Web 2.0 changes that.
Yes, oh senior contributor ryin, we need an "About us" page. I did update my profile, at least!
I'd never heard of Web 2.0 until I hopped over here.
When I was working on doing the first Mosaic installation at my university...days of gopher, ftp and irc...the driving factor was accessibility and democratization of information. It was, of course, unrealistic because at the time few people had computers, had use for a conncection into any network, and content-makers all had emails that ended with *.edu.
Not really all that democratic.
I wonder about what the web's becoming, though. The same way I wonder about how we receive our news (customized over the web, or choosing our flavor of bias as in Fox News and others). We select songs off albums to download, if we don't like the whole album.
I love that I can find research in seconds when I have a patient with something uncommon...a transfusion reaction secondary to an excess of HLA proteins...or has a fifty dollar term in the history and physical, which I can look up to mean "bizarre toe pain."
But has the web as it is now made me more connected to people? Have you *seen* myspace?
I don't know. Food for thought. I like that you guys are doing this.
/jo
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