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Web 3.0
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Tue Jan 17, 2006 10:12 AM
from the worth-your-time dept.
from the worth-your-time dept.
SpunOne writes "Apparently Jeffrey Zeldman is as sick of Web 2.0 as many of us have become. In his latest article, titled "Web 3.0," he really sticks it to the Web 2.0 fan boys, and dispels a lot of the hype generated by our young new friends. It's easy to grow apathetic when a new idea gains so much traction so quickly, but his points are clear and accurate, and deserve consideration."
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pfft.. (Score:4, Funny)
what's (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:what's (Score:5, Insightful)
Consider a web site you visited 10 years ago. Now replace all the boring HTML with exciting AJAXified scriptaculosity!!
Also RSS is really important to Web 2.0, even though it's been around for 10 years and still has glaring flaws that remain unaddressed since that time. (How do I indicate something's been updated or deleted without triggering duplicate entries in everyone's feed reader?)
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It is a way to get another bubble (Score:5, Insightful)
Well yeah. EVERYONE had to have a website. Didn't matter what you sold you had to sell it online as well. Billions were invested in making everything available online. Clothes, food, pets, toys. Some made sense (porn) most did not.
Yet at the time it was claimed that the Information Superhighway (remember that one?) was going to totally change the way we lived. The new economy because the old one was just not the way to do it anymore. You actually had companies loosing stock value because they had not announced an internet strategy. Profits? Who cares.
In hindsight of course it all seems perfectly silly. Snail mail disappearing as email takes over. Eheh, tell that to the poor guy slumping a ton of mail with all the christmas cards. Brick and Mortar stores a thing of the past? Oh sure, tell your girlfriend that there is no need to go shopping with her, she can just browse on the laptop while you play Battlefield 2 and it will be just the same.
So the bubble burts, a few companies survived and things more or less went back to business as usual (wich it always does).
Ah, but surely the failure was because the tech was not ready for it? Well now we know better and we are ready for another try. Instead of portals now the buzzword seems to be social networks. Whatever those may be. It is again a combination of tech that has been around for a while but been buzzed up and vague promises about a social revolution.
Bloggs probably are part of it as well.
So what is it? Old tech in a sexy skin and hype. Is it bad? Hell no! I loved the bubble. Fat paychecks, easy going atmosphere and nobody in charge who had a clue as to what it was what you were doing. Websites with a dozen visitors written in code that would crash at the 1000th post and running on sun hardware and oracle databases. The job ads promising a company car have appeared again. Just hope that the geeks this time get proper regonistion and the sex from gullible girls that we so richly deserve.
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Re:It is a way to get another bubble (Score:5, Insightful)
It did totaly change the way we live. It just did it in a subltle manner.
I used to spend hours a month writing and mailing checks. I used to have to drive to the bank to transfer money between my checking and savings accounts. Now I do it all on-line.
I used to have to buy a paper to find out what time a movie was playing. Now I go to the cinema's website. If I want, I can even buy my ticket on-line, and print it out at home. No more standing in line.
If I wanted to order a book, I'd have to go to this thing called a library, and use this thing called a card catelog, and look through a bunch of tiny pieces of paper (think punch cards without the holes). Then I could either fill out the request form, or hope that my local bookstore had it in stock. Now, I can hit Amazon or B&N, and if I don't want to order on-line, I can grab the ISBN and have my local bookseller get me a copy.
When I wanted to talk to people, I had to actually talk to them. Completely synchronos. Now I email them whenever I get the chance, and the get back to me when they have the chance. I can send the same message to a dozen people, and there's no "telephone game" involved.
If I didn't know something about a topic, it was another trip to the bookstore, or hope for a good PBS special. Now it's a quick trip to Google or Wikipedia. Information is just there, waiting for me to be curious.
Our lives have changed. Not in a Back to the Future 2, wow, that skateboard is flying way, but in a thousand subtle, essential ways, so much so that it is honestly hard to imagine life without the net.
Heck, I just used Yahoo Maps to look up a zip code, and Google to find out a bookstore's hours.
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That's all well and good. . . (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.parm.net/web2.0/ [parm.net]
Come on people, we're all sick of buzzwords, but you can't deny the reality of Web 2.0!
Igi
start thinking about usability and design (Score:5, Funny)
We need to immediately have a meeting to discuss reducing complexity, increasing usability and clarifying our goals.
Re:start thinking about usability and design (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:start thinking about usability and design (Score:5, Funny)
Brought to you by the fine people at http://www.robietherobot.com/buzzword.htm [robietherobot.com]
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Paul Graham (Score:5, Interesting)
More like 0.2 than 2.0 (Score:5, Insightful)
From A List Apart [alistapart.com]:It soon appeared that "Web 2.0" was not only bigger than the Apocalypse but also more profitable.
The only difference between 1.0 and 2.0 comes down to the languages used to generate the content. Switch from C++, Java, and Perl to Ruby On Rails, PHP, and Python, change HTML tables to XML, use AJAX liberally. Result? OK, you get Flickr and the like, but it still runs on the same tired architecture. "Web 2.0" doesn't become a reality until "WWW: Then Next Generation" comes to pass, where security and efficiency become the flavor of the day.
Re:More like 0.2 than 2.0 (Score:5, Funny)
WWW : The Markup Protocol
WWW 2.0 The Wrath of Kazaa
WWW 3 The Search for Social Networks
WWW 4 The VRML Homepage
WWW 5 The Final Flickr
WWW 6 The Undocumented Context
then we get to WWW:TNG
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Re:More like 0.2 than 2.0 (Score:5, Informative)
The portability problems with Ajax aren't that big. It's like porting from one UNIX to another - they all support basically the same interface, but all have some shortcomings.
No you don't. Ajax etc is built on top of an HTML foundation, which includes accessibility mechanisms.
I hate the way GMail is always held up as an example. The code behind GMail is terrible. If the tab order is screwed up, then it's because the Google developers screwed up, not because Ajax was used. And if you want hotkeys, click 'Settings' and change the thing that says 'Keyboard shortcuts off' to 'Keyboard shortcuts on'.
Accessibility mechanisms and control over layout are mutually incompatible. Accessible interfaces require that the user has control over the layout, not the developer.
Things like Ajax usually speed up web applications. And if you are comparing web applications to desktop applications (your whole comment seems to be about desktop vs web rather than 1.0 vs 2.0), then web applications can still be faster - I can search my webmail faster than I can search my normal email.
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hold on a bit longer (Score:4, Funny)
Web 2.0: Where solutions don't need problems? (Score:5, Insightful)
Having worked in web development for many years now, I really find that, today, Javascript is a solution looking for a problem to solve. It seems to have only legacy relevance to today's development requirements.
AJAX? Why?
Well, I guess in the 'war' between Gmail and Hotmail, fancy AJAX front ends might make something of a difference, if all other things are pretty even, however for your average developer, how does it apply.
Yes, some people might get a bit of internet fame for creating some bit of software that has rounded corners and gradients, and you can update stuff without the page refreshing, but in my development cycles if I were to propose this:
Planning Phase
Development Phase
Testing Phase
(now we have a working, accessible application)
Development Phase 2 (AJAX it up while maintaining accessibility)
Testing Phase 2
Release
I would be having serious questions asked of me in terms of whether the extra time and cost would ever justify the "benefits". Bear in mind that when we have discussed AJAX implementations at work the first response was "well, aren't people kind of used to page refreshing now anyway? so aren't we potentially confusing people the other way? They expect a page refresh as an indicator of something having changed or happened".
Flame on... I'm gone (but not very sweet)
Re:Web 2.0: Where solutions don't need problems? (Score:5, Interesting)
First, where did you get your development cycle and why would you not implement XMLHTTP to begin with (the first development phase)? No wonder your ideas are getting shot down
But, I digress. To be honest, I have been using XMLHTTP going on three years now, since well before it was known as AJAX and there are problems that it, and Javascript, solve. I would imagine it all has to do with the type of problem. In my case, I was involved in a project that implemented JSR-168 portlets in a Jetspeed environment. Unfortunately, we had requirements that each portlet had to refresh with data, some at 5 second increments, some updates would be 5 minutes. So, you have a user configurable portal and each portlet had to be dynamic. Sure, you could use a full page refresh, but that would require the refresh time to be set to the shortest duration. Plus, some of the data we presented would require a sizable pull from our Oracle database. Doing that every 5 seconds would have been a nightmare. So, each portlet has its own Javascript implementation that inherits a base XMLHTTP class. Works like a charm and met every one of the customer's timing requirements.
Additionally, I wrote an image looper that worked a great deal like a media player that would update itself with data as new images arrived (it was a weather project). Instead of refreshing the popup window, XMLHTTP was used to retrieve a listing of images and add any new ones to the list. It was pretty cool stuff.
Should XMLHTTP be how we do all web solutions? No, I totally agree with that. But it does present the developer with some unique ways of doing things.
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Re:Web 2.0: Where solutions don't need problems? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well said. This is really the fundamental question present, isn't it? We've been doing it for a couple of years, before the "AJAX" term appeared. As a sidenote, I believe the reason this term took off so well is because the web had been naturally moving in this direction, a lot of bleeding edge developers felt it, knew it in their bones, but until that point, didn't have any term to latch onto. Like a chemical reaction where all the reagents are present in the right quantities but the catalyst is missing.
The answer of course depends on your business circumstances. Ajax isn't right for everyone, but because it's the current buzz word, you'll see a lot of abuses of ajax in the coming months. Sadly it'll detract from the elegance that the technology can lend users.
So anyway, to answer your question in a general fashion, it's got several advantages from traditional web development.
Most importantly, from a user perspective, a well thought out ajax application means a much more responsive interface, and really nothing else. If you expose anything else about ajax to your users, you're doing it wrong (IMHO). The snappiness comes from two aspects. First, asynchronous requests means that the user can keep working while something is processing in the background. Second, there's simply less data to transfer in a well thought out site, so the page itself downloads faster (though usually only on the 2nd and later hits since the first hit involves downloading a potentially sizy library).
Now this point should not be under-considered. From an evil marketing perspective, having a website where users can complete the ordering process in 7 seconds from search to receipt means more sales. Not because you can handle a higher volume (though that's another of ajax's benefits), but because users have less time to reconsider their purchase. Less opportunity to say, "Wonder if I'll find a better deal elsewhere," or, "Do I really want to spend $400 on a new camera when my old one actually does everything I need."
From a technical perspective, I see two main benefits in practice.
First, it represents lower server loads. Traditional web development means you have to rebuild every page every time the user clicks anything. The framework, the navigation, and the logic that goes into determining whether the user sees specific page elements, all has to be redone from scratch every page hit. That takes time and resources: memory to hold that page data on a buffered system, network bandwidth to transfer it, and cpu time to generate it. On a low volume site, this is meaningless. If you're serving 500-1000 hits a second though, this adds up. Of course in that case you're going to have load balancing, and money to throw at additional hardware.
However our work has shown about half the load on a heavily ajax based app from a traditional app, so that's fewer things to go wrong, fewer 2am calls because a hard disk crashed, and fewer hours spent troubleshooting why your edge optomized routing isn't optomizing its edge routing.
Also, from a development perspective, this is exactly the Model View Controller framework that so many people really like to enforce in their development practices. The roles are also clearly defined, since each role happens in a different location. No matter how many MVC frameworks I've worked in, it's always felt forced to me. You end up doing things in an odd and counter-intuitive way in order to pound your complex business logic (which invariably seems to affect display).
The biggest problem is that often business logic *is* the display. In the end, either you end up passing many dozens of flags to your display to affect these things (the correct way, but with more flags, becomes increasingly difficult to not make mistakes), you end up generating some of the display in the model portion (much easier, so lazy programmers will often take this route), or worst of all, you end up putting business logic in the displa
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Where are the facts? (Score:5, Informative)
As far as I can tell, the only salient point made is that wire-framing a site with AJAX is difficult.
Web 2.0 doesn't really sound like the web (Score:5, Insightful)
If you can't explain it in fifteen seconds... (Score:5, Insightful)
A fool and his money? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ironic that there seems to be some emphasis on usability, as if this weren't possible with the antiquated Web 1.0. What a pant-load! I find Google to be usable. In fact, there are many "old fashioned" sites that are perfectly usable.
People don't go to Netflix because it has "dynamic content"; they go because they want movies mailed to their house. They visit ebay because they want to buy or sell stuff. Am I going to visit ESPN because now there's more crap floating around the screen screaming at me to click-it? Nope, I visit only to see the scores of last night's game, or possibly even to read some commentary. The experience has never been good enough to be a draw in and of itself. Heck, there's a new IMAX theater in town, and I won't even go there until a decent show is screening.
The same basic tenet applies to all versions of Web x.x...
If your site is useful or entertaining people will visit. Dynamic content can help A LITTLE BIT in IMPROVING a site, but they cannot make the site good just by their being employed.
Dumb Terminals 2.0 (Score:5, Insightful)
In my Web 3.0, I want applications to use my machine. I want applications to be sandboxed, I want to run them securely, and they need to be fast and capable. Java applets (although everyone hated it) is much closer to Web 2.0 than anything we have now. As much as the Slashdot crowd might hate it, the next version of the Web might come with Windows Vista, with Xaml (SVG like) applications, hardware accelerated 3d graphics, and running with limited permissions. I hope there are alternatives too.
Before you start flaming me, think about cycles wasted per second.
Technology, VCs, and Users (Score:5, Insightful)
Users tend to like Web 2.0 apps. A friend of mine showed me his company's Basecamp [basecamphq.com] setup and I was blown away. He had over 30 employees and outside vendors working on about a dozen different projects, and all of it was managed in Basecamp. For $100/month, he is able to keep much better track of everything than in the past, when he relied on Entourage and a variety of other apps to pull it all together. He has people using Windows, he has people using Macs. He has a slim IT department. His people actually enjoy using Backpack, which also makes his job easier, because he doesn't have to cajole them all the time.
The best of the Web 2.0 apps have a transformative effect for users not because of any technological revolution, but because the apps feel much more like client-side apps. They operate smoothly and feel more fluid. Scoffing at this is akin to saying that user interface improvements are not very important, which is odd coming from someone like Zeldman. Even subtle changes in how an app works at the user end can make a huge difference in how the user feels about the app. The very fact that people refer to Web 2.0 products as apps rather than sites shows this. Sure, dynamic websites have always really been applications. It's just that to most users, they didn't feel that way. Now, because of new coding approaches, the apps feel like apps.
Is this an epic revolution? No. But it is the start of something new, in that a host of small companies with far less startup funding than in the Dot Com era are starting to pop up. They're trying different things. Many of them are trying the same things in slightly different ways. Most of them will not last very long. But this time, the money situation is different. Web 2.0 isn't about huge VC money and absurdly valued IPOs. It's about real businesses following established business practices. Figure out how to make something that people want to use. Figure out how to make money doing it. Go do it.
I can understand why Zeldman is wary of the hype, but just because the VCs are jumping on the bandwagon doesn't mean that Web 2.0 is pure hype. To me it is invigorating to check out my TechCrunch [techcrunch.com] feed and see so many interesting web applications popping up. The future has not yet been commoditized. As a whole, the web development community has learned a great deal about what works and what doesn't, not just from a technology perspective, but from a business persepective. In my opinion, Web 2.0 is much more about applying those lessons than about the breathless hyperbole of VCs. It really is different from the Dot Com era.
Re:Oh boy. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Screw that, I wrote about Web 4.0 (Score:5, Insightful)
Web 1.0 is about allowing societies to create and share ideas.
Web 2.0 is about allowing groups to create and share ideas.
Web 3.0 is about allowing individuals to create and share ideas.
Yes, from day 1, anyone could put up a simple webpage, but dynamic content, and truely meaningful webpages which can actually get some readers were reserved for only businesses with lots of money. Now today with opensource languages which are free to use, and operate on a free OS, you can run your own webserver with dynamic content for nearly free (the cost of your internet connection).
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