I was reading an exchange between
Abe Burmeister and
Peter Merholz about the nature of this nebulous (and
contested) idea of
Web 2.0. The debate is about power, and whether or not one of the
key pillars of Web 2.0 is (or should be) companies giving up power to their users.
There are so many questions in there, so I'll throw out a subset:
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What does Web 2.0 mean to you?
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Is Web 2.0 a good term? Are there better ideas?
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What separates Web 2.0 from "web"?
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Do you as a developer feel compelled to give up more control to your users?
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Do you as a user feel that companies are giving you more control?
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What tools do you use that you feel most typify the aesthetic of Web 2.0?
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What do you want to see more of in future Web 2.0 tools?
1. well shit, I just was e-mailing eMachineShop.com about this today. At the bottom is the original excerpt.
1. Web 2.0 means a web-enabled experience.
2. Words are words. It is the idea is paramount.
3. "web" is a web site. "Web 2.0" is an immersive experience.
4.Yes, it is where we should head.
5.Yes (ie Flickr, Google, Yahoo! all have open-APIs)
6.FireFox, GreaseMonkey, Flickr, Google Earth, Book Burro
7.Mobility, which is mostly a hardware issue at the moment, but will increasingly become a software challenge as mobile tech explodes. I want my AR (Augmented Reality.) I want my "Artificial Intelligence" and I want my "Intelligence Amplified." That's where I want IT to take me and I think we are definitely headed in that direction.
I want the web to totally surround and blanket my life. The Web 1.0 was really about testing the waters and getting some static data HYPER REFERENCED. HREF was the MVP of Web 1.0 but he is flat. The Web 2.0 begins to have some thickness to it. It starts to envelop you a little.
A Conversational User Interface (CUI) by 2015?
"...The web critiquing community likes to throw around the buzz phrase "Web 2.0" whether that be Flickr, Grease Monkeyed sites, or Map Hacks which have remixed Google Maps. Well since the critics don't have a unified voice or a unified set of criterium for what necessitates a Web 2.0 site, I, Ted Wheeland, am giving you my stamp of approval as an unofficial (but in a distributed society there can't be an official anyway) Web 2.0 site.
In my mind the Web 2.0 is about one fundamental change, the change from web site to web enabled experience. Let me cite examples which will further clarify my point. Flickr is not just a photo-sharing site. Photo-sharing sites are WebShots, Fotki, Snapfish, ect. Flickr is "a visual playground" (Salon), an experience. It has an open-API, uses AJAX, an gathers as much metadata on each image as it can. This is only part of the experience. It offers the tools to create communities in and out of Flickr. It becomes an experience at the convergence of these technologies.
Okay Grease Monkey is not a website nor a a web experience. Yet is a powerful technology that has enabled Book Burro . It is a truly web-enabled experience. The experience is shopping for a book. Yet it checks all the competitors stores, genius.
Map Hacks are just another benefit of open-APIs.
Well eMachineShop is definitely a Web 2.0 experience. One downloads software. Okay stop right there. Already you are no longer a fucking web site. Web sites don't make you download their custom software. Then you have to dream something up which means you're probably going to listen to some Daft Punk so you can feel like a futuristic hipstersci-fu badass. Then after dreaming some swank design you draw that bitch up pronto and order..."
Posted at 8:05PM on Dec 18th 2005 by Theodore Wheeland