web2.0pia
From Wikipedia:
According to Tim O’Reilly, “Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.”
but also:
Some technology experts, notably Tim Berners-Lee, have questioned whether one can use the term in a meaningful way, since many of the technology components of “Web 2.0” have existed since the beginnings of the World Wide Web.
Berners-Lee is right in saying that, technology-wise, there’s nothing about web2.0 that is not in web1.0. We are making our blogs and sites nicer - polished and greyish with cool css - more functional and organized via user-generated folksonomies, more discoverable via rss, more participatory and so on. This is all nice, but clearly this is just reusing web components that have been around for a while. We are still very html 4.01 and we’re probably going to stick to that for a while.
O’Reilly, though, is also right. He talks about business - a revolution - a new business model. The web is already fully immersed into it and we are seeing advertisement potential prevail over technical and functional capabilities (e.g. myspace and youtube).
Myspace, in particular, is, in the O’Reilly paradigm, an example of web2.0 application. It is a big deal and it understands “the rules for success” pretty damn good. I went to Twiistup last week, an event to showcase tech talents in Southern California. All of the start-ups showcased that I talked to mentioned myspace in a way or another (they had fancy widgets, gadgets and services for your myspace profile). It was weird to hear all those web-2.0-startups talk about myspace. But, it’s the way it goes. Myspace, with its 1996-look is *the* web2.0. In fact, it does not even use folksonomies, microformats or ajax. But, it’s got the $$$ and the public. Myspace Tom has 179380791 friends (as of today) and probably doesn’t really care about rdf or xhtml. Does he need to?
Footnotes
1. Thanks to Leila Chirayath for coining the term web2.0pia (web2.0 + utopia).
2. The image above depicts 30,000 reams of office paper, or 15 million sheets, equal to the amount of office paper used in the US every five minutes, by Chris Jordan.
