09-01-06
Category: Web 2.0
Key Points:
- Several leading Internet thinkers including Tim Berners-Lee, have leveled criticism at the conceptual underpinnings of the term 'Web 2.0.'
- The preoccupation with Web 2.0 obscures the fact that the current technical configuration of the online landscape is the result of technologies that drove 'Web 1.0.'
- According to Berners-Lee, Web 2.0 is "purely a blog and wiki think."
***
Excerpt - For full article, please visit The Register.
Analysis Five years after the first internet bubble burst, we're now witnessing the backlash against Web 2.0 and a plethora of me-too business plans, marketing pitches and analyst reports exploiting the nebulous phrase.
Tim Berners-Lee, the individual credited with inventing the web and giving so many of us jobs, has become the most prominent individual so-far to point out that the Web 2.0 emperor is naked. Berners-Lee has dismissed Web 2.0 as useless jargon nobody can explain and a set of technology that tries to achieve exactly the same thing as "Web 1.0."
According to this transcript, Berners-Lee was reacting to an IBM developerWorks pod cast interviewer who'd categorized Web 1.0 as connected computers and making information available, and Web 2.0 as connecting people and facilitating new kinds of collaboration. Those who remember the empowering effects of Netscape and the moment email became more than just borrowing your mate's CompuServe account at work will also recognize such blanket assertions of historical revisionism for what they are.
Berners-Lee's words come as the hype around all things Web 2.0 reaches a zenith. Entrepreneurs hoping to become the next Google or Salesforce.com acquisition, marketing types desperate for a home run, analysts segmenting the market to sell research, and opinionated bloggers have, at the latest count, attached the phrase "2.0" to 12 other "concepts" or technologies.
We have: SOA 2.0, enterprise 2.0, grid 2.0, VoIP 2.0, voice 2.0, BPM 2.0, Office 2.0 and - outside of pure technology - advertising 2.0 and marketing 2.0 (both - naturally - taking advantage of Web 2.0's social networking technologies), business development 2.0 and - subverting the genre - hidsight 2.0 and lunch 2.0.
There are two common problems with Web 2.0 and its derivatives. The first is the desire to characterize Web 2.0 as unique technology with unique consequences for business.
Web 2.0 relies on technologies that have been around for years. Berners-Lee pointed out the things that drove Web 1.0 also underpin Web 2.0 - the document object mode, HTML, http, SVG, web standards and - because he's old school "Java script of course." Free Software Foundation chief legal counsel Eben Moglen recently concurred at this month's LinuxWorld, saying Web 2.0 owes its existence to software and development methodologies already established in open source.
"The phenomena of the empty buzzword called Web 2.0 can only exist because of the real layer for free and open source software underneath," Moglen said, letting the Web 2.0 crowd down gently.
Web 2.0 is, in Berners-Lee's definition, purely a blog and wiki thing. Reinforcing that idea is Andrew McAfee of the Harvard Business School, who is actually credited with creating the phrase Enterprise 2.0. Enterprise 2.0 wraps up wikis, blogs, RSS and Ajax, according to McAffee. While the ingredients that makes this stuff have been lying around for years, what makes things so different is the way it's all coming together right now. Services are affordable, services are morphing to create social networks, and tools are helping filter blog and wiki content.
While enterprise software is indeed evolving thanks to blog and wiki technologies - well, at least so far as adding RSS to things like Microsoft Outlook and Windows goes - Enterprise 2.0 simplifies the complex history of, and relationship between, business and technology. Remember the PC revolution? Or what about remote working? Or e-commerce? Genuine milestones in the evolution of business because they fundamentally changed companies' structures and cultures. Yet these rate as incremental product version numbers somewhere between Enterprise 1.0 and Enterprise 2.0, apparently.
It's interesting to note Web 2.0 poster child Wikipedia may expunge Enterprise 2.0 for a second time after the phrase was resurrected from the digital dead.
Full Article
