Huddled Masses
February 11th, 2008 | 
Author: This “Web 2.0” nonsense is still ridiculous, and I thought I’d just throw this out there to express my annoyance. The one thing you’ll notice here is that at no point do we get a new version just because you started using the same old tech for different purposes. Water does not become Water 2.0 just because you use it to wash your car instead of drinking it, nor because you put it in bottles and pretend it’s worth it’s weight in gasoline. Neither does the web get a new version just because some corporate muckety-muck discovered blogging, nor even when someone finally notices XmlHttpRequest and dreams up a new acronym for “fetching data from a webservice via a javascript in a web page”. What we can do is change the version number when we make a significant change in the underlying technologies.
- HTML = 1.0
- Client-Side Script (Js/Vbs) = 2.0
- Style Sheets = 2.5
- Server-Side Scripting (Perl/Php/etc)= 3.0
- Server-Side Databases = 3.5 (the first real web apps — apps that didn’t just manipulate something you already has)
- XML and XmlHttpRequest (partial page reloads) = 4.0
- The single-browser web (Netscape dies and the web becomes a uniform platform of IE5 compatible sites). = 4.1
And at some future point in time …
- Client-Side Databases = 5.0 (this is in the HTML5 spec released this month)
- Rise of MicroFormats = 6.0 (this is where microformats emerge as recognized standards)
- Social Web = 7.0
In the Social Web, browsers become true portals, with integrated identity management, instant messaging, contact management and feed aggregation. Micro-formats are one of the supported standards, and browsers can parse them and store and track their information. When you comment on a website, your OpenID is tracked with a microformat vcard, plus your browser offers to ping your OpenId enabled tracking service so your friends can follow a central feed of all your comments and forum participation across the whole web (based on your anonymous OpenID). All of this happens without third party plugins that nobody installs.
So yeah … Web 2.0? The Social Web? No. I think not.
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Hear, hear! Nice idea this, bring a social aspect to the web….Or is it? Maybe, just maybe we should be somehow tearing ourselves away from the screen to spend social time face to face with people? Another issue altogether, yes. I do have to say that without the ‘information superhighway’ I’d be lost and out of touch with all my friends and family back in the states…
Okay, back to the focus. While I like the fact that people are experimenting, I do have to say that 97% of every “Web 2.0” service I read about seems to fit a niche of less than a thousand people – which of course reduces it’s functionality to …. well, a very low level. And I fully agree that this is sillyness/madness/nonsense to use a new version marker for it all! But sigh I also fear we’ll be seeing “Web 2.0” for a long, long time to come. Sign me on to the ‘annoyed/mildly disgusted’ bandwagon here.