11 Feb
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.
And at some future point in time …
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.