This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz
by James Britt.
Original Post: Web 2.0 and counting
Feed Title: James Britt: Ruby Development
Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/JamesBritt-Home
Feed Description: James Britt: Playing with better toys
The "Web 2.0" buzzword turns up in assorted places, usually with a different spin each time. Does it mean software as services? VB-like trick-widgets for flashy UIs? Microcontent? All of that? None of that? All depends on who you ask.
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.
Bray also links to comments by Tim O’Reilly, who says, in part, "More immediately, Web 2.0 is the era when people have come to realize that it's not the software that enables the web that matters so much as the services that are delivered over the web."
Obasanjo writes,
I also dislike the Web 2.0 meme but not for the reasons Tim Bray states. Like the buzzword "SOA" that came before it "Web 2.0" is ill-defined and means different things to different people. Like art, folks can tell you "I know it when I see it" but ask them to define it and you get a bunch of inconsistent answers.
I've been going through the PDF version of Agile Web Development with Rails: A Pragmatic Guide, and while I have not read the whole thing, I did read through the chapter on Web 2.0. What a letdown. It's not that the content isn't valuable; it is. It's the peculiar emphasis on (admitedly slick) JavaScript to produce often-handy (but, almost as often, misused) GUI widgets that may help make Rails the VB of the New Millennium. I had read a preview version of the chapter online, and had hoped that the complete version would move on past the DHTML gloss, but it doesn't. Perhaps I'd have been less disappointed if the chapter was simply called AJAX (though the use of actual XML in the examples is, um, nil, I believe.) At least the buzzword would have been more on-target.
Ironically, while the book attempts to cash in on the current Web 2.0 buzz, the UI fetish of that particular chapter give it a rather Web 1.0 pallor. What makes a snappy, AJAX-rich Wb app such as Google Maps Web 2.0 is not the snappy, AJAX-rich UI, but the fact that you can embed/combine the services in/with other applications or services.
Towards the end of his piece, Obasanjo says.
On the other hand I completely grok the simple concept that folks like me at MSN are no longer just in the business of building web sites, we are building web platforms. Our users are no longer just people interacting with our web sites via Firefox or IE. They are folks reading our content from their favorite RSS reader which may be a desktop app, web-based or even integrated into their web browser. They are folks who want to create content on our sites without being limited to a web-based interface or at least not the one created by us. They are folks who want to integrate our services into their applications or use our services from their favorite applications or sites. To me, that is Web 2.0.
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