dslade.blog

Going through my old post drafts, “cleaning my blog house”, and found this post draft from last year (or maybe the year before). Seems semi-relevant, so what the heck, going ahead and publishing it. Even if some of my points then, seem wrong today. enjoy, critique, flame, etc as you wish.

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Someone recently asked me “what is web 2.0?” and referenced a piece written by Tim O’Reilly.

ah yes, good ‘ol O’Reilly, sage oracle of the technical world (not a slam, but a compliment). But a warning, rest of comments were made after becoming bored with the first page and closing the site. Sorry, I don’t normally do that, but “web 2.0″ hype often annoys me.

I think the dot-com bubble should be called for what it is, an adjustment to a period of financial hyper-valuation. My 2 cents, they’re just using it as a convenient chronological event. I don’t feel there was a specific shift in technologies at the time of the collapse, nor a Darwinian shakeout, imho. Technology is ever-evolving. Some of those companies that went bust were sound as a pound, technologically, their principal problem was they were selling cat food online with the market cap of Cisco Systems.

I’d say around a year after the bubble was a period of blossoming and/or maturing of many technologies, into web 2.0 technologies. Many of which which we’re starting to be showered with today.

For the shift to web 3.0 (if it’s call that by the time we get there), I think that could well be more of a shakeout of transitionary technologies (forums, chat, etc). I think the next big shift will be towards technologies like:

1. those that help business be more efficient (eg, AI order routing),
2. showing users data in real-time to save from clicking around, etc, aside from the capitalization of fads.
3. Maybe even a lot of the mobile technologies that everyone hoped for in web 1.0 will finally come to fruition, and make a company some money. Likely developing countries will drive that last point, where landlines are prohibitively expensive.
4. And/or those technologies that help people become more connected in real-time (see, hear, smell, etc. and immersion of our senses).
5. what about more automation?
6. expansion and development of distributed systems?
7. better visualization of massive amounts of data? in real-time
8. and growth of intelligent design?

The list could go on, but it’s late, and I’m under-caffeinated.

Dunno, perhaps another way to look at it:
web 1.0, technology empowering worthless businesses
web 2.0, businesses empowering worthless technologies
web 3.0, victory for the little man, big businesses losing to people who now have more free technology than they know what to do with. And small niche markets of all kinds finally become viable, which at the time, we thought was to be the reality in web 1.0.

Web-services is the only thing really impressive bit with strong business potential from web 2.0, and it is more web 1.0 if you follow their time scale. Ditto for wikis, and syndication (which is just a more fancy want of saying partner/affiliate program). All these have very solid roots in web 1.0, I remember working on some of them at Amazon (pre bubble). For web 2.0, I think most is bells and whistles at this point (eg, growing use of javascript), or the masses waking/catching up to technology that was already there. I’ll probably get crucified at some point for that last comment.

If I follow their shakeout-market bubble logic I would say web 2.0 is more of a popular media label applied to our current (post bubble label), lead up in hype to a possible second bubble. Likely far less dramatic. I pray. Maybe we should all start buying bonds and gold.