TITLE: Is Web 2.0 a Mirage?
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: February 03, 2006  4:52 PM
DESC: Doing research for OOPSLA 2006 tutorials led me into the Web 2.0 discussion.
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BODY:
Everyone is talking about Web 2.0 these days.  This
isn't the sort of buzzword that tends to absorb me,
as patterns and refactoring and agile methods did,
but as
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2006-01.html#e2006-01-16T12_46_44.htm">
   tutorials chair</A>
for
<A HREF="http://www.oopsla.org/2006/">
   OOPSLA 2006</A>,
I am keen to get a sense of what developers are talking
about and interested in learning about these days.
Web 2.0 is everywhere, and so I've been reading a bit
deeper to see what we should offer, technology-wise,
at the conference.  But the sociology of the term and
its penumbra has been as much intriguing as its
technology.

<A HREF="http://christiansepulveda.com/web20blog/archives/8">
   Christian Sepulveda</A>
gave thought to why Web 2.0 had captured mindshare now
and how it was different from what we've been doing.
His answer to "why now?" centered on the convergence of
intellectual supply and demand: "The demand for a user
centric web, where sharing, communication and a rich
experience is the norm, is intersecting the availability
of technology, such as RSS and AJAX, to make it happen."

How is Web 2.0 different from Web 1.x?  It is driven by
the demands and needs of real users with real problems.
So much of the previous web boom, he feels, was driven
by a "build it and they will come" mentality.

Of course, that mentality worked for a lot of ideas that
took root back in the old days -- even the 20th century!
-- and now have matured.  Wikis and blogs are only two
such ideas.

Paul Graham took a
<A HREF="http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html">
   somewhat more dispassionate position</A>
on Web 2.0, which isn't surprising given his general
outlook on the world and, more relevant here, his own
experiences <EM>doing</EM> cool web stuff back before
the "availability of technology, such as RSS and AJAX,
to make it happen."  Here's my precis of his article,
consisting of its first and last paragraphs:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
Does "Web 2.0" mean anything?  Till recently I thought
it didn't, but the truth turns out to be more complicated.
Originally, yes, it was meaningless.  Now it seems to
have acquired a meaning.  And yet those who dislike the
term are probably right, because if it means what I think
it does, we don't need it.

The fact that Google is a "Web 2.0" company shows that,
while meaningful, the term is also rather bogus.  It's
like the word "allopathic."  It just means doing things
right, and it's a bad sign when you have a special word
for that.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

Graham applauds the fact that Ajax now brings the
ability to develop sites that take advantage of the
web's possibilities to everyday developers.  I found
his discussion of democracy on the web, exemplified by
sites such as del.icio.us, Wikipedia, Reddit, and Digg,
to be right on the mark.  The original promise of the
web was how it could help us share information, but
that promise was only the beginning of something bigger.
It took guys like
<A HREF="http://c2.com/~ward/">
   Ward Cunningham</A>
to show us the way.  This sense of democracy extends
beyond participants in social conversation to those
folks we in software have always called
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2005-10.html#e2005-10-19T18_14_36.htm">
   users</A>.
It turns out that users get to participate in the
conversation, too!

In the March 2006 issue of Dr Dobb's Journal, editor
at large
<A HREF="http://www.ddj.com/columns/swaine/">
   Michael Swaine</A>
expressed a more cynical version of Graham's take:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
Web 2.0 is a commemorative coin minted in celebration
of the end of the dot-com crash.  Like all commemorative
coins, it has no actual value.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

So, we should focus our attention on the technologies
that buttress the term, but as Graham points out the
ideas behind the technologies aren't new; they are
just in a new syntax, a new framework, a new language.
The software world creates its own troubles when it
recycles old ideas in new form, and then complains
that the world is changing all the time.

The cynical view on AJAX itself is expressed with
great amusement by Brian Foote in
<A HREF="http://www.laputan.org/catfish/archives/000139.html">
   What's New Here is that Nothing is New Here</A>:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
The fascinating thing about Ajax is that it is an
amalgam of existing technologies that all date back
to the twentieth century.  It's what the Web 2.0
crowd might call a mash-up.  Only the name is new.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

Of course, all this cynicism doesn't change the fact
that today's developers need to learn the current
technologies and how to make them play with the rest
of their software.  So we'll certainly offer the best
tutorials we can for the folks who come to OOPSLA'06.

And, as always, we should be careful not to let our
nostalgia for our old tools blind us.  For a sanity
check on a slightly different topic (though perhaps
more similar than the subject indicates), check out
<A HREF="http://adamconnor.org/?p=38">
   this article by Adam Connor</A>.

Busy, busy, busy.
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