You Know You're Web 2.0 When...

"Long Live Web 2.0, Whatever the Name"

Mar. 9, 2006 12:15 AM

You Know You're Web 2.0 When...

Yes, the title of this piece is sure to be a bit provocative as the term Web 2.0 bottoms out with a vengeance in the infamous trough of disillusionment. Those in the know realize it's no longer cool to say Web 2.0 in many technology circles. Even the IT columnist blowhard John C. Dvorak lined up this week to take the obligatory swipe at Web 2.0, possibly to coincide with O'Reilly's latest talk about it at the sold-out Emerging Technology conference this week (best quote: Web 2.0 represents "people inside the machine".) And Gibu Thomas just made a great set of observations about what people in general think about Web 2.0 taken from a group podcast made at the recent Naked Conversations launch party. Upshot: Most people actually equate Web 2.0 with an Ajax browsing experience.

Strikingly, all this hand-waving and gnashing of teeth is over a whole lot of nothing. I personally, though well known as a proponent of Web 2.0, am completely ambivalent about the term itself. Like anything, it's what's actually happening that really matters and it just turns out that the term Web 2.0 is the best and most articulate vision of what we're seeing unfolding on the Web today. And though some folks see many of the smaller startups as doomed to failure in a crowded market, it's much more about the bigger story of the billion people on the Web today and what they're doing. Because they aren't going away.

I look around at terrifically exciting technologies like Ruby on Rails (lightweight programming models), the community created tag clouds that are available on more and more sites (harnessing collective intelligence and folksonomies), pervasive syndication and Web servicing of content via RSS (small pieces, loosely joined and Web as Platform), and yes, even rich, immersive, roaming software (Ajax and RIAs). These are all indicators of a larger trend: The emergence of a social software super platform that rapidly evolves as reflection of its combined users and their information.

Web 2.0 as the Social Software Super Platform

Now, John Dvorak was right in one sense in his article. That most people don't care about Web 2.0 and they never will, they just want to get things done. And a big piece of Web 2.0 is using the Web to do things yourself. In this respect, I certainly agree. The part where he's wrong is that the supply side of the equation has to know what the pieces of Web 2.0 are in order to create great online social software. Web 2.0 really is design patterns and business models for the next generation of the Web. Saying that Web 2.0 is purely about self-service is laughably naive, incomplete, and wrong-headed. However, I do agree with John that a lot of this is "old wine in new bottles." I've written extensively about this, probably the best in The Timeless Way of Building Software; what's old is new again though with a different twist and a whole lot more scale.

Anyway, you're probably here to see how you know that you're Web 2.0. Here are some ways. And of course, you're always more than welcome to add all the ones I missed at the bottom.

You Know You're Web 2.0 When...

You can easily comment on, or preferably, actually change the content that you find on a Web site.
You can label your information with tags and use them to find that information again.
Your Web page doesn't reload even once as you get a whole lotta work done.
You are actively aware of other users' recent activity on a site.
It's possible for you to easily share with others the information you're contributing on the Web site.
You can syndicate your information on a Web site elsewhere on the Internet through a feed like RSS or Atom.
You can pick and choose the pieces of a Web site that you like and then add that functionality to your own site.
There are easy ways to find out what content is the most popular or interesting at the moment.
You heard about a new Web site because a friend enthusiastically recommended it to you out of the blue.
There happens to be a mind boggling amount information and a lot of people on a site, yet it seems easy to find what you want and communicate with others.
Everything you ever added to a given Web site can be removed easily at your whim.
The Web site actively encourages you to share and reuse its information and its services with others. And it even provides a license to do so.

And of course there's a lot more and I can easily see how it might seem like people are throwing in the kitchen sink when they use the Web 2.0 umbrella term. But the ideas really are linked together (again see the aforementioned Timeless Way of Building Software) and reinforce each other, often critically. The good news is still that people don't have to understand much of this to use it, but we do, and must, in order to build it. Start studying...

So, long live Web 2.0, whatever the name. Or, can we just build some great software with these ideas without arguing about the term?

posted Wednesday, 8 March 2006

Published Mar. 9, 2006— Reads 28,433 — Feedback 2
Copyright © 2006 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.

Related Stories

▪ Ten Ways To Take Advantage of Web 2.0

▪ Web 2.0 Design: The Ajax Spectrum

▪ Web 2.0 and the Five Walls of Confusion

▪ AJAX Starts To Grow Up and Bindows Helps

▪ Sixteen Ways of Thinking in Web 2.0

▪ You Know You're Web 2.0 When...

About RIA News Desk
Ever since Google popularized a smarter, more responsive and interactive Web experience by using AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript + XML) for its Google Maps & Gmail applications, SYS-CON's RIA News Desk has been covering every aspect of Rich Internet Applications and those creating and deploying them. If you have breaking RIA news, please send it to RIA@sys-con.com to share your product and company news coverage with AJAXWorld readers.

SOA World Latest Stories

Cloud Expo New York: Accelerate Enterprise Cloud Deployment

By Elizabeth White

According to a 2011 survey by the Independent Oracle User Group, over 50% of Oracle’s customers have deployed or are considering deploying private clouds. Most private clouds today support non-production workloads because enterprises are unable to deploy mission-critical applications i...

Cloud Expo New York: Industry-Leading CxOs to Present June 11-14

By Jeremy Geelan

What do the CTOs of the CIA and the U.S. Dept. of Justice and the CIO of the National Reconnaissance Office have in common with the CEOs of Eucalyptus, GoGrid, ActiveState, Appcara, OpSource and Nortonworks, the CTOs of Rackspace, SoftLayer, SOA Software and AppZero, the Founder & Gene...

The Ultimate Cloud: Building the Modular Data Center at Cloud Expo NY

By Elizabeth White

Many key benefits make the Dell MDC a compelling alternative for your data center solution. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Steve Cuming, Executive Director of Data Center Solutions at Dell, will take a look at the hyper-efficient, snap-together, flexible choice m...

Cloud & Big Data Strategy | CEO Power Panel at Cloud Expo New York

By Liz McMillan

In this CEO Power Panel at the 10th International Cloud Expo, moderated by Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan, leading executives in the Cloud Computing and Big Data space will be discussing such topics as: Is it just wishful thinking to depict the Cloud as more than just a te...

Charting the Adoption of Cloud at Cloud Expo New York

By Pat Romanski

In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Marvin Wheeler, Open Data Center Alliance Chairman, will discuss the success the organization has had in charting the requirements for broad-scale enterprise adoption of the cloud and how 2012 is forecast to be the tipping point for ...

That Boom You Hear Is the Cloud

By Patrick Burke

Cloud computing is creating the new Wall Street boom, according to NIA. The only industry that is as bright as cloud computing on Wall Street is social networking, NIA said in a recent report. 2012 will be known as the year cloud computing became widely adopted worldwide. Cloud comput...