The Floccinaucinihilipilification of Web 2.0

It is a dire necessity of the times to do some degree of floccinaucinihilipilification of Web 2.0. To understand the concerns lets take a look at what makes Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 crowd, like its predecessor now commonly referred as Web 1.0 or dotcom hype artists, is characterized by over-enthusiasm of technologies and solutions that have been commonplace in traditional 3-tier applications for decades and even web applications.

Web 2.0 brings in interactivity of plain-jane web applications using AJAX (a JavaScript technology). Previously many web applications had limited client side interactivity with JavaScript. Any task concerning the server required a round-trip with a new page being loaded as a result of GET or POST request. Google can be fairly credited for popularizing AJAX.

The type of interactivity mentioned above was however available to Java applets and Flash based applications from the early days of web. Java applets suffered from negative marketing hype for not much valid reason or fault of its own. Flash applications suffered too but fared better overall and are seen in many places even today primarily due to its capability for generating nice graphics easily. While a JavaScript solution is preferably because they are inherently present in browser and are lightweight than either of the above; AJAX do not represent a paradigm shift.

Web 2.0 is a term to group some technologies like tagging, blogging etc. Tim O’ Reilly, believed to be the originator of the term, conveniently classifies Web 2.0 by example:

This is obviously a marketing picture and tends to gloss over the failed solutions in the same place. While AdSense is touted as Web 2.0, its less fortunate brethrens like Kontera are not. Kontera uses context sensitive ads over links instead of placing them in fixed locations like AdSense.

However taking away the hype there still remains few pieces of technologies worth noting:
Tagging, Blogging, RSS & Atom syndication and Wiki

Blogging, social network & wiki
Blogging, social networks and wiki represent a trend of increasing user participation. However they are not the first ones to do so. Bulletin Boards predates even Web. Forums have been there for ages. Slashdot is very much Web 1.0 and it too did enable user participation in a big way. Today what we are seeing is a simplification and maturing of these technologies.

BTW: Wiki has been very much a part of Web 1.0.

Syndication
Syndication is an age-old concept used by media outlets. RSS made it simpler and accessible by common people. Almost every blog software today comes with automatic syndication capability built in.

Tagsonomy
Tagging while interesting is not a novel concept either. It is folksonomy with a flat hierarchy.

Free & unrestricted service
It is a common strategy for new product and technologies to be provided for a cheap price and with less restrictions. It is solely aimed at gaining market share. Once that objective is established then restrictions start to be added and priced offerings are made. eFax and Namezero are two well known companies from Web 1.0. eFax offered free fax number to anyone who asked and Namezero offered free domain names. Down the road Namezero just became a value added domain register while eFax offers paid fax-to-email services. Their free service still exists but with lots of restrictions and very hard to find. Namezero stopped giving free domain names. MySpace of today has slowly started clamping down on unbridled freedom and moving towards heavily monetizing their service. Friendster and LinkedIn have followed suit long time ago. Free services will only remain free so long they suit the bottomline of the provider. Businesses do not provide free and unrestricted service for altruism, neither Google nor anyone else. I predict in about 10 years time Google search will become a paid for service too.

Book 2.0
An interesting thought experiment, as someone suggested, would be to consider a hypothetical world where eBooks are norm and the “revolutionary technology” of paper books have just been introduced. Paper books are cheaper, easier to read, carry and share, virtually indestructible, can be easily bookmarked and carried in the toilet and you can donate it when you are done. Isn’t it a revolutionary paradigm? Let’s call it Book 2.0 where Book 1.0 is eBooks as we know today.

Simplification and accessibility to all
The pervading theme of so-called Web 2.0 concepts is making pre-existing technologies simpler and more accessible to common man (or woman). While commendable, it is hardly worth the hype it is generating. Whenever any technology matures (in this case internet and web), a long phase of trying to make it more accessible and simpler follows automatically. In that way Web 2.0 is merely Web 1.01 or at best Web 1.1. It is more evolutionary in nature than anything revolutionary, neither in concept nor in paradigm.

Note:
In the eighteenth century, Eton College found from grammer book four words in Latin which all meant “of little or no value” - flocci, nauci, nihili and pili. As an erudite humor, someone joined these together and then stuck –fication at the end to create a noun for the act of deciding that something is worthless. In 1999 Senator Jesse Helms used it in commenting on the demise of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty: “I note your distress at my floccinaucinihilipilification of the CTBT”.