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Web 3.0 316

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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Web 3.0

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  • pfft.. (Score:4, Funny)

    by tont0r ( 868535 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @10:17AM (#14489978)
    Web 4.0 will kick his Web 3.0's ass. He needs to get with the times.
  • what's (Score:5, Insightful)

    by iogan ( 943605 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @10:17AM (#14489980) Homepage
    What's web 2.0?
    • Well according to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] it's:
      what some people see as a second phase of development of the World Wide Web, including its architecture and its applications
      Sounds a bit crap really
      • I was really expecting "Web 2.0" to come with "Internet 2.0," but it seems someone has been inventing buzz words again to note progressions in the technology.
    • Re:what's (Score:5, Insightful)

      by generic-man ( 33649 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @10:36AM (#14490106) Homepage Journal
      It's a lot like Web 1.0, but with JavaScript instead of Flash and RSS instead of RSS.

      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?)
      • Re:what's (Score:2, Informative)

        by feijai ( 898706 )
        AJAXified scriptaculosity!!
        For that hillarious made-up word alone you should be modded 5.
      • 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?)

        Try Atom.

      • Atom [atomenabled.org] is also spelled R S S, just ask mozirra! Of course, a format can't dictate the behavior of your reader...
        • True, true. Safari is my reader and it's notoriously bad at duplicating entries that have merely changed. It also uses "RSS" as a term for "syndication" regardless of whether the site truly uses RSS or Atom.
      • Re:what's (Score:3, Insightful)

        exciting AJAXified scriptaculosity!!

        You mean, exciting AJAXified unhyperlinkability!!

      • Re:what's (Score:3, Insightful)

        by wootest ( 694923 )

        (How do I indicate something's been updated or deleted without triggering duplicate entries in everyone's feed reader?)

        You change the entry's summary or other content and keep the same GUID. As there's no way to determine what's a GUID in RSS 2.0 this week (because Dave Winer controls that, and he doesn't mind retconning the semantics of the spec while not actually explaining it in the spec but in weblog posts), a wise course of action would be to use Atom.

      • Re:what's (Score:3, Informative)

        by WWWWolf ( 2428 )
        (How do I indicate something's been updated or deleted without triggering duplicate entries in everyone's feed reader?)

        RSS 2.0 has <guid> element or something along those lines. Atom has <id>. Those are supposed to give a single, unique ID to entries so they can be differentiated. Of course, the knowledge of site authors / CMS authors about that, and reader support for such niceties, mmm, spottyish stuff...

    • ipv6?
    • by SmallFurryCreature ( 593017 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @10:45AM (#14490172) Journal
      Oh okay maybe that is over cynical. However what was the first bubble? Was it perhaps that the world believed that somehow a combination of tech was going to change the way we lived our lives?

      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.

      • sex from gullible girls that we so richly deserve

        Isn't that what MySpace is for?
      • Oh okay maybe that is over cynical. However what was the first bubble? Was it perhaps that the world believed that somehow a combination of tech was going to change the way we lived our lives?

        Well, it did, didn't it? At least for tech consumers, anyway? Are not people walking around in a little personal impenetrable bubble of technology with iPods and cells and whatever else hanging off them like bandoliers and gun belts of the Wild West?

        Oddly enough, this creates a rather paradoxical effect, where p
      • 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 announ
      • Yet at the time it was claimed that the Information Superhighway (remember that one?) was going to totally change the way we lived.

        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.
  • by millahtime ( 710421 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @10:18AM (#14489989) Homepage Journal
    Just In Case I make My websites with Web 8.0. This should keep me good for at least 2 or 3 more months.
  • by igibo ( 726664 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @10:19AM (#14489994)
    . . .but here is an indisputable rebuttal.

    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
    • by jg21 ( 677801 ) *
      >>> we're all sick of buzzwords, but you can't deny the reality of Web 2.0!

      Just so. Indeed, may I just offer, amid all this indignant debunking, a simple metric based on fact rather than prejudgement?

      One of the many blogs hosted at SOA Web Services Journal [wsj2.com] is one by Web 2.0 Workgroup member Dion Hinchcliffe. In terms of page views, the blog [wsj2.com] crossed the 500K mark after just over 90 days...here are the exact stats:

      Hits since 24 Sep 2005:
      502,587
      (4,786.54 per day)

      Total Blog Entries

      • We clearly need 2.0 2.0. It's just like 2.0 1.0, but it's totally interactive ans dynamic and socially collaborative with Ruby tags all over the place. It also has rounded corners.
      • jg21 wrote:

        Just so. Indeed, may I just offer, amid all this indignant debunking, a simple metric based on fact rather than prejudgement?

        First, you obviously didn't read the link in the post you're replying to. (Unless you're being equally tongue-in-cheek.)

        One of the many blogs hosted at SOA Web Services Journal is one by Web 2.0 Workgroup member Dion Hinchcliffe. In terms of page views, the blog crossed the 500K mark after just over 90 days...

        Second, the popularity of a blog or the ideas therein do

  • by digitaldc ( 879047 ) * on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @10:20AM (#14489997)
    more often than not, big teams have slowly and expensively labored to produce overly complex web applications whose usability was near nil on behalf of clients with at best vague goals.

    We need to immediately have a meeting to discuss reducing complexity, increasing usability and clarifying our goals.
  • by Anonymous Coward
    This will beam web content right into your brain! Then.. to enable the DRM, a thug will come to your location and give you a hit or two upside the head with a sledge hammer.

    Only problem I am having is getting people to access Web XP a second time :(
  • Paul Graham (Score:5, Interesting)

    by torunforever ( 930672 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @10:24AM (#14490020)
    Paul Graham's take on Web 2.0 [paulgraham.com] is a good read.
    • Re:Paul Graham (Score:2, Informative)

      by swb ( 14022 )
      Most fanboys think that Paul Graham's take on his latest turd is a good read, too.

      Which isn't to say that it might not be, but the cult-of-personality surrounding Paul Graham kind of gets old after a while.
      • by MuValas ( 91840 )
        Why can I not have moderation points at a time like this to help others see the genius in your statements?

        Although, I would have stated your post more like ... "Fuck Paul Graham with a red hot fork".

        I think your way is a bit more diplomatic though.

  • by Billosaur ( 927319 ) * <wgrother&optonline,net> on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @10:25AM (#14490029) Journal

    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.

    • by click2005 ( 921437 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @10:39AM (#14490127)
      "WWW:The Next Generation"... Aren't you a bit ahead of yourself there?

      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
    • I completely agree. Switching from "1.0" to "2.0" technologies loses you as much as it gains. You win:
      • Some portability. I reckon AJAX is little more portable than Java (if at all) because no two Web browsers are ever quite the same; you're just dealing with differences between browsers rather than differences between OSes.
      • No installation step. Users can launch your application just by following a hyperlink.

      You lose:

      • All the accessibility mechanisms that OS GUI frameworks have. Everyone loves GMail, but navi
      • by Bogtha ( 906264 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @11:40AM (#14490573)

        no two Web browsers are ever quite the same; you're just dealing with differences between browsers rather than differences between OSes.

        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.

        You lose all the accessibility mechanisms that OS GUI frameworks have.

        No you don't. Ajax etc is built on top of an HTML foundation, which includes accessibility mechanisms.

        Everyone loves GMail, but navigating around it without a mouse is a real pain. No hotkeys, and an unpredictable tab order.

        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'.

        Proper control of the layout of your UI.

        Accessibility mechanisms and control over layout are mutually incompatible. Accessible interfaces require that the user has control over the layout, not the developer.

        A whole lot of performance.

        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.

        • Gmail may or may not be the best living example of AJAX. But the bottom line is that AJAX is an attempt to use a scripting language inside a document model. Conceptually not unlike using VBA to program a UI inside a Word document.

          The grandparent's point that most of that functionality should be pushed down below the scripting level is spot-on. There's a reason why UI development kits like .NET are popular: they are far more complete and robust than a scripting language attached to a markup renderer. For
          • by Nurgled ( 63197 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @03:15PM (#14492655)

            It should be noted that it's possible to use AJAX with XUL in Mozilla. XUL gives you a UI toolkit based around a DOM, and while it has its shortcomings it's definitely a lot better than HTML. Since XUL is XML-based the same techniques used to deal with AJAX in HTML can be applied, but you also get XBL bindings which allow you to hide bundles of functionality behind opaque objects thus creating custom widgets. Also, both the builtin widgest and any custom ones can be styled using CSS so you can still get your brand in there.

            Of course, it only works in Mozilla-based browsers. Not much good on the Internet right now, but at my company we have a few internal webapps based on the Mozilla "platform" which seem to work well for the users. I think this is a good place to head: all that's lacking is a good standard which serves the same purpose as XUL. XUL itself is adequate, but there are a few places where I think it needs a bit of work before it can be considered good enough for widespread development. XBL is already good, and for Mozilla browsers it can already be applied to HTML and SVG documents so it's by no means XUL-specific.

            Microsoft seems to be heading in a similar direction with XAML. I think it'd be a good idea to get a good, general, open standard out there before Microsoft launches XAML and it's too late.

  • I was surfing the web 2.0 on my Commodore 64
  • by gEvil (beta) ( 945888 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @10:28AM (#14490050)
    Everyone knows that it won't reallty be usable until it hits Web 3.1.
  • by germ!nation ( 764234 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @10:29AM (#14490062)
    I imagine many people will bite here, however this is not a troll post.

    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)
    • People are still under the impression that web applications can duplicate the "feel" of a native desktop application. Ignoring all those pesky browser buttons that would destroy any AJAX application, JavaScript does make many web apps feel snappier. The app still breaks the second two backbone ISPs have a slap-fight [slashdot.org], you refuse to pay another $30 for wi-fi access at a Starbucks, or some moron starts BitTorrenting Linux ISOs at work.
    • by BRock97 ( 17460 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @10:47AM (#14490180) Homepage
      Damn, I'll bite....

      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 ;-). My college profs would have been steamed if I proposed something like that....

      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.
      • First, where did you get your development cycle and why would you not implement XMLHTTP to begin with (the first development phase)?

        Because it'd be stupid, the main point is to built incremetally on a stable base. XMLHTTP is NOT a stable base, it's not a base at all and it has 0 stability. I find that most people participating in the Web 2.0 wankfest really should read this essay on progressive enhancements [hesketh.com], because that's the way to build web apps that actually work well and reliably: incremetally. When

    • While I tend to agree that there is a bit of pomp and fluff to a lot of the Web 2.0 technologies, I think that the divide between websites of 2006 and websites of even 2003 is just as large as the divide between the Geocities websites of 1994 and the websites of 2003. In short, web development is accelerating and telescoping like all good technologies.

      At their heart, Web 2.0 technologies are being used to improve accessibility and information through standardization and better dissemination modules. But you
    • by SmallFurryCreature ( 593017 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @10:55AM (#14490236) Journal
      It is with the back button. Try it with gmail and opera. It doesn't work as expected. Refresh don't matter, gmail does a "loading" thing and if your on a fast con you don't really see the refreshing anyway.

      But the back button is the accepted way to back out of an unwanted action and if it is not handled as expected or at least disabled AND warned about then people get confused.

      I do not and most web developers don't because we usually HATE the back button as it can really mess with your web apps. Use the fucking cancel button already.

      Nonetheless your website has to work as expected.

      I used non-refreshing pages for a long time. One of them was a long list of songs where I wished to cue songs to be played. Rather then load it each time you "selected" a song by clicking on an image and javascript would then request a new image wich was a script wich queed the song and returned an image to indicate it had been queed.

      Granted AJAX goes a lot further and is very nice BUT I hardly see it as a web 2.0

      Ofcourse I never was any good at getting millions needed to finance an upstart either.

      If Web 2.0 gets the investment money flowing again then good luck to it. The bubble at least had the economy running. Something like the second law of thermodynamics, energy is never lost? Neither is money. For everyone who lost money in the bubble someone else earned it. Me! And frankly that is all that matters.

    • You don't just AJAX something up. It's not like something you just plug in, change a config file, and BLAMO it's AJAXified! You design applications with AJAX in mind. Now, some people will (and have already) used AJAX in horrendous ways (ie: Navigation). But there are many GOOD uses for AJAX. For example, I have a corporate phone directory our receptionists use. It lists all of the employees, indicates if any of them are out of the office, and shows which other receptionists are online. That would be enough
    • Yes, Javascript is overused. That doesn't mean it cannot be useful, it just means that there are a lot of overenthusiastic developers out there.

      Your development phase argument is a straw man. Ajax doesn't need extra development phases at all. It's just another form of Javascript.

      If you think that Javascript and Ajax are useless, then you can't be looking very hard. Sure, you can get by without using Javascript, but since when is just getting by something to strive for? Why should people have to

    • by nahdude812 ( 88157 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @11:27AM (#14490477) Homepage
      AJAX? Why?

      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
  • by darjen ( 879890 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @10:29AM (#14490065)
    This rant is no better than someone bragging that they liked such and such a band before it got popular. Then they proceed to complain that the band sold out and no longer writes good music. Oh please!
    • He really doesn't have anything insightful to say at all. I guess he has one point, that we've all heard before: the "Web2.0" buzzword is just that. It doesn't gaurantee anything good, but some good things could be labeled "Web2.0", as the term has been applied(buzzed). Really nothing new and exciting here. Just go read Pual Graham's article as someone else said. You may not agree with him, but I always find a few interesting thoughts in his essays, whether he's right or wrong(75%-25%, respectively, IMO).
  • Where are the facts? (Score:5, Informative)

    by shoolz ( 752000 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @10:30AM (#14490072) Homepage
    The summary suggests that he really "he really sticks it to the Web 2.0 fan boys". But really, the article seems like nothing but a pissy rant. He doesn't put forward the issues and talk about them methodically.

    As far as I can tell, the only salient point made is that wire-framing a site with AJAX is difficult.
    • A point he made is that AJAX is nice and usefull for some cases but it still has problems.

      The biggest point he made was that labeling stuff as Web 2.0 is simply marketing hype and an attempt at starting a new bubble.

      [Bubbles are in practice a stockmarket supported pyramid scheme and as in all such schemes, the first ones in make the most money and last ones in loose the most money]

      Concentrating on his points about the technology itself is totally missing the point of the article.
    • It's social commentary, not a whitepaper.

  • by pHatidic ( 163975 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @10:32AM (#14490083)
    If anyone is interested, I recently put up an essay on why Web 2.0 is worthless as currently defined by the technology, and redefined it in a way that makes it more useful. The problem with the current definition is that it can't be used to make predictions, and the definition isn't concrete enough to be actionable. This is because it is defined vaguely in terms of "something something AJAX."

    Instead, I propose that:

    Web 1.0 is about allowing individuals to create and share ideas.
    Web 2.0 is about allowing groups to create and share ideas.
    Web 3.0 is about allowing societies to create and share ideas.

    The article speculates about the future of blogging and how digital identity will have a much more profound impact on the Web than AJAX and that stuff. This is because, as Howard Rheingold said, "The "killer apps" of tomorrow's mobile infocom industry won't be hardware devices or software programs but social practices."

    Anyway, if you are interested you can read the rest [alexkrupp.com].

    • by romiir ( 874939 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @10:45AM (#14490171)
      Quote:
      Instead, I propose that:
      Web 1.0 is about allowing individuals to create and share ideas.
      Web 2.0 is about allowing groups to create and share ideas.
      Web 3.0 is about allowing societies to create and share ideas.
      Actually it's quite the opposite...

      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).
    • by mooingyak ( 720677 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @11:28AM (#14490481)
      ahem... but it turns out that the real use is...


      Web 1.0 is about allowing individuals to create and share porn.
      Web 2.0 is about allowing groups to create and share porn.
      Web 3.0 is about allowing societies to create and share porn.


      Or more succintly, since the above distinctions seem pretty meaningless (in both my and your versions), web = porn (or ideas, or whatever you think really happens on the web).
  • Just make feeds and tags for everything on your site and that should about do it. Anything else web 2.0 requires will be picked up by the jerk On Rails(tm) in the article's automated web 2.0-based robot. It comes to your site and integrates with everything, disables your browser's back button, and leaves a pile of buzzwords in your guestbook.

  • by Cougem ( 734635 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @10:36AM (#14490107)
    According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
    'Proponents of the Web 2.0 concept say that it differs from early web development, retroactively labeled Web 1.0, in that it is a move away from static websites, email, the use of search engines, and surfing from one website to the next, to a more dynamic and interactive World Wide Web.'
    Moving away from email? Email has absolutely nothing to do with the WWW. It's a completely different service. It sounds more like Internet 2.0. You'd never call an email a webpage.
    • You'd never call an email a webpage.

      You would if you were a technological moron, which, it seems to me, most of the people pushing "Web 2.0" are.

      It is true that the way people are using the web is becoming more pervasive and that developers are creating more user friendly and dynamic sites. But to say this makes it a fundamentally different medium (which seems to be what the Web 2.0 crowd are implying) is just silly. It is an upgrade over what came before, so it that sense "2.0" makes sense. But the hype, o
    • You'd never call an email a webpage.

      How did you survive the spame age!?
  • I lost patience after, like, three or four pointless pages.
  • Who is this Jeffrey Zeldman?

    And, as Rasmus Ledorf [theaimsgroup.com] said, ". Lots of people have been using similar things long before it became "AJAX"."
    • by ubernostrum ( 219442 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @11:26AM (#14490465) Homepage

      Who is this Jeffrey Zeldman?

      He's well known among web designers who work with modern web standards, for a couple of reasons:

      • A List Apart, the site that article is on, has long been considered one of the better publications for the web-design industry, and he's the one who started it.
      • His article To Hell With Bad Browsers [alistapart.com] back in 2001 is seen by many as having really kicked off the move to modern standards-based web design and development.
      • Since then he's been involved in a number of high-profile redesigns and a lot of web-standards advocacy, and is now considered one of the "gurus" of web standards.
  • by AEther141 ( 585834 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @10:44AM (#14490164)
    It's probably bullshit. The world is full of concepts which aren't really concepts - big balls of fluff that proport to be explaining this hard-to-explain idea but are really just hiding the total lack of substance. Web 2.0 is very much one of them. Web 1.0 is trivial to explain and the concept of hypertext really was revolutionary. A simple idea excecuted well that allows people to do something new, or do something old in a radically new way. Same goes for pagerank, same goes for ebay, same goes for every billion-dollar idea that didn't go out with pets.com. Web 2.0 has no meat, no heart, no simple revolution. Smoke and mirrors for marketers and dwellers of the blogospheric ghetto.
    • This reminds me of this time a few years ago, when XML was the big new thing, and every middle manager was insisting that their crappy little development project used it? It still seems like some have yet to realise that XML is about as exciting as when CSV files were invented. Useful and an improvement, yes - saviour of modern technology, no.

      It's refreshing, in this article, to finally read a well constructed comment on the reality of the big loada bull that is "Web 2.0" - the whole concept has caused me s
    • Exactly.

      Two years ago, "Web 2.0" meant XML and RSSing everything.
      Last year, "Web 2.0" meant web services and putting up a WSDL/API to everything.
      Now, "Web 2.0" means AJAXing your site.

      Which one is it? Fuck you, buzzword proponents and marketeers.
  • Sneeringer's maxim of online communities: When users have the power to determine a site's content, the site's content will be determined primarily by those with the most time to waste.

    Without some sort of editorial check, the signal to noise ratio of any community-driven online content continously drops. I've seen it on Usenet numerous times. I've seen it on sites like PhotoSig (where the most porn-ish images always get voted up regardless of quality), Boatertalk (where they had to create a whole new forum
  • I've still not fully figured out Web 1.0 yet.

  • by SloppyElvis ( 450156 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @11:02AM (#14490283)
    It seems everyone in this forum is clear on the fact that Web 2.0 isn't the revolution VC's want it to be. At best, its hopeful it will displace the real estate bubble as the bubbliest bubble around.

    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.
  • by NardofDoom ( 821951 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @11:02AM (#14490284)
    In other news: Only a very few people will get rich and everyone else will continue to have to work for a living, many of them in jobs they don't like.

    Since when has not being a multi-millionaire been a bad thing?

  • On the subject of AJAX, has anyone tried to use it from (for want of a better term) 'first principles' - i.e. not just using a toolkit to do the heavy lifting, but written a mini-project to find out what AJAX is fundamentally about?

    I did this. The overall impression I get is that AJAX is the term for what is a really ugly kludge. The old RAF terminology for what AJAX is is 'graunching' - forcing components together that don't really fit. It doesn't feel elegant, it feels nasty. It feels like forcing HTTP to
    • Javascript generating fragments of HTML to build a user interface in particular feels like a very blunt instrument...

      Ideally, I think, you'd use a language like PHP or RoR to generate the bulk of the XML, and JavaScript to parse the input/output. More like client-side processing than anything, so that web pages appear "faster" than if they had to send every little change to the server.

      Of course, I have yet to try and program an AJAX application.

      Even a simple interface has performance reminiscent of W

  • Dumb Terminals 2.0 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cyberjessy ( 444290 ) <jeswinpk@agilehead.com> on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @11:03AM (#14490297) Homepage
    The real problem with Web 2.0 is that it completely ignores the power of the client machines. Even if you have a screaming processor with a gigabyte of RAM, it is just the same as if you had a 3 year old machine. While its ok, even ideal for documents and general reading is that what we desire from Applications, which is what Web 2.0 is about? The Web has not really grown up from HTML Docs.

    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.
  • I for one am waiting for the new and improved WebXP
  • by Infonaut ( 96956 ) <infonaut@gmail.com> on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @11:22AM (#14490434) Homepage Journal

    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.

  • That was the biggest load of incomprehensible bolox I've seen today. There will always be spin doctors and idiots who listen to them, why waste time and effort complaining about them. There is more to Web 2.0 than AJAX and XML, read http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/ 2 005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html?page=1 [oreillynet.com] and stop complaining about how you liked XML before it became fashionable.
  • Web 2.0 reminds me of the XBox 360, a little bit better and a whole lotta hype.
  • "...but his points are clear and accurate, and deserve consideration."

    ...you're new here, aren't you? :-)

  • The author was trying to convey his sense of disillusionment to the whole "Web 2.0" debacle. His point initially was that he was attending a conference and overheard this gentleman in front of him spewing forth the hyperbole of the "Next Great Thing" dismissing the current structure of the Web as "Web 1.0" which he obviously just heard from another conference.

    The author then goes on to state that "Web 2.0" was already alive and active prior to the term "AJAX" being coined in a white paper, meant to as

  • I'll just skip all the way to Web 40,000. At least then I can use Space Marines for site security against Chaos-bred spamworms.
  • Forget the Buzzword (Score:2, Interesting)

    by stelmach ( 894192 )

    I don't understand why people have such a distaste for all things labeled 'Web 2.0.' I'm not a fan of buzzwords, and there's nothing I hate more than a middle manager with a head full of technologies he knows nothing about. But let's forget about all that and think about what it is we are trying to accomplish. I don't know about you, but I would like to make better web sites. Web sites with better usability.

    Let's face it, Tim Berners-Lee never fathomed the web would be used the way we use it today. The

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