It often seems like I’m way behind on the buzz word frontier. When I get to these outposts of neologisms they’re past their gold rush days and are ghost towns inhabited by the die-hards and the dogmatic; the 49ers and speculators have moved on to another cool conceptual vein to exploit.
Suddenly I’m hearing a lot about Web 2.0, there are a ton of sites and posts about it and now an O’Reilly conference.
I don’t want to rain on any one’s parade because I’m as keen about this stuff as the next guy, but the stuff they’re talking about has been mooted for quite a few years, web services, many pieces loosely joined, SOAP, etc. It’s just now that there are a few public facing sites that are now making full use of these concepts. And what’s interesting about reading about web 2.0 is that it’s a definition by selection. Flickr, delicious (i can never remember where the dots go) and Google maps are all pointed at as being “good”, they are 2.0, other things are not because the 2.0 community deems they are not.
Primarily though these things are still web sites. The vast majority of the bigger things are used purely for their Web 1.0 effectiveness, and that’s why they’re around. Some of the other 2.0 stuff is the purely the province of geeks, and more so the hacks that require greasemonkey or some other messing around to set it up.
One of the great things about this is that it is a rallying flag and a communicable concept. I’ve always had problems communicating these things to people who don’t get it. A frustration I’m sure most people in the web have felt at some time. However encapsulating it and having some heroes and success stories as well as a sweet little philosophy help make this a real thing. This sort of stuff helps sell it to the organisations beyond the early adopters, even if they don’t understand the philosophy they can be convinced by the dogma.
But as I did say before, even if I do appear a little cynical, I’m as fired up about this 2.0 stuff (Though I’ve only just found out what it’s called, I would just whiter on about XML, web services and open APIs. Now I have a clumsy buzz word.) as anyone. I can see the promise, in that hazy way of seeing futures that have a big fat rich mess of creative opportunities. Most importantly for now the thing that is great and most helpful about the, heroically proclaimed, 2.0 apps is that they are also successful 1.0 apps. The 2.0 side of them, APIs and open, remixable data is still nascent, but they do the 1.0 stuff really, really well. We need these 1.5 apps to get to 2.0, otherwise the 2.0 will languish, like it has done for years, even though the technology has been available. These are the bridges, the proof and the rich loam for experimenting on that will make the 2.0 dream a reality.
NOTE: A bit hasty above, the conference is in its second year and is itself the namesake for this whole 2.0 thing.
