web 2.0?

This page looks at what has been characterised as 'web 2.0' (or the more self-important Web 2.0), variously praised as the second generation of the web and dismissed as commercial hype or babble. It also considers potential futures, including metanets and ubiquitous data clouds.

It covers -

• introduction
• web 2.0
• metanets

     introduction

Web 2.0 - sometimes pitched as "the second coming" of the web (or even of the internet) - gained major media coverage in early 2006 after first appearing in 2004. That appearance, as discussed below, followed recurrent attempts by pundits and profiteers to gain attention for their characterisations of the 'next' internet. It reflected the traditional ten to twelve year media and investment cycles, with a lessening of scepticism five years after the dot-com bubble.

Apart from employing journalists it is questionable whether 'web 2.0' reflects a coherent or particularly useful concept. That is because of the range of meanings behind the label.

Paul Boutin thus commented that

Calling Technorati a "Web 2.0 search engine" sounds sharp but explains nothing. If you can only describe a word by examples, skip to the examples instead: "It's a search engine for blogs that uses tags, like Flickr." There's an easy way to describe today's online culture of participation without invoking Web 2.0 at all. Just call it the Internet. That way, everyone will know what you mean.

     web 2.0

The 'Web 2.0' notion originated as a 2004 Silicon Valley conference on the theme of "The Web as Platform", claiming to explore

how the Web has developed into a robust platform for innovation across many media and devices - from mobile to television, telephone to search

and of course showcasing sundry gurus of varying credibility. It is an echo of Esther Dyson's problematical Release 2.1: A Design for Living in the Digital Age (London: Penguin 1998).

Pundit Tim O'Reilly defined Web 2.0 in 2005 as

Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an "architecture of participation," and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences

and elsewhere identified its nature as -

• "the web as platform - Web 2.0 doesn't have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core. You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core".
• "harnessing Collective Intelligence - The central principle behind the success of the giants born in the Web 1.0 era who have survived to lead the Web 2.0 era appears to be this, that they have embraced the power of the web to harness collective intelligence"
• "Data is the Next Intel Inside - ... The race is on to own certain classes of core data: location, identity, calendaring of public events, product identifiers and namespaces. In many cases, where there is significant cost to create the data, there may be an opportunity for an Intel Inside style play, with a single source for the data. In others, the winner will be the company that first reaches critical mass via user aggregation, and turns that aggregated data into a system service."
• "End of the Software Release Cycle - ... one of the defining characteristics of internet era software is that it is delivered as a service, not as a product"
• "Lightweight Programming Models"
• "Software Above the Level of a Single Device - ... it's no longer limited to the PC platform."
• "Rich user experience"

O'Reilly claimed that "the core competencies of Web 2.0 companies" are -

• Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
• Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
• Trusting users as co-developers
• Harnessing collective intelligence
• Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
• Software above the level of a single device
• Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models.

The publicists at Forrester had their own mantra in 2001, announcing the imminent death of the web. It was to be replaced by the "X Internet" (X for extended and executable but apparently not excessive), characterised by pervasive networking of intelligent devices in every location. Pervasiveness was to begin to appear within four years and be in place by the end of the decade.

The X Internet is

less about the Web and more about Internet applications. It is more than the home, more than people. It is connecting things - your air conditioner to your washing machine to your car

and will represent a shift from static information - characterised as "dumb" and "boring" - to "experience".

Kevin Kelly rhapsodised that the web is becoming

the OS for a megacomputer that encompasses the Internet, all its services, all peripheral chips and affiliated devices from scanners to satellites, and the billions of human minds entangled in this global network. This gargantuan Machine already exists in a primitive form. In the coming decade, it will evolve into an integral extension not only of our senses and bodies but our minds ... We will live inside this thing

That echoed philosophising about the telecosm and about an internet-based noosphere, with David Batstone of Fast Company for example exulting in his 2001 Alfred Deakin lecture that

... within the next 10-20 years we can anticipate the evolving convergence of humans and machines. Computing will disappear as we know it. Data will flow directly to our retinas from implanted eye screens, making laptops, cell phones, and palm devices wholly redundant. We will have wireless access to high bandwidth all the time. Websites will morph into real-time environments, allowing us to share experiences with invited others. Jump ahead another two decades and we'll flood our brains with nanobots that will serve as even more sophisticated communicators and memory banks. Nonbiological thinking will be billions of times more powerful than biological thinking.

Children today receive inoculation shots before entering kindergarten; by 2035 they very well may be required to receive an infusion of intelligent nanobots giving them with all the information they will need to know; school books a vestige of the past.

Tim Bray commented

I've come to dislike this 'Web 2.0' faux-meme. It's not only vacuous marketing hype, it can’t possibly be right. In terms of qualitative changes of everyone’s experience of the Web, the first happened when Google hit its stride and suddenly search was useful for, and used by, everyone every day. The second - syndication and blogging turning the Web from a library into an event stream - is in the middle of happening. So a lot of us are already on 3.0. Anyhow, I think Usenet might have been the real 1.0. But most times, the whole thing still feels like a shaky early beta to me.

Iconoclast Nicholas Carr in The Amorality of Web 2.0 noted

When we view the Web in religious terms, when we imbue it with our personal yearning for transcendence, we can no longer see it objectively. By necessity, we have to look at the Internet as a moral force, not as a simple collection of inanimate hardware and software. No decent person wants to worship an amoral conglomeration of technology.

And so all the things that Web 2.0 represents - participation, collectivism, virtual communities, amateurism - become unarguably good things, things to be nurtured and applauded, emblems of progress toward a more enlightened state. But is it really so?

 


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