Nov 14, 2008 Posted by Herko on Nov 14, 2008 in All things Web, Personal notes | 1 comment

Quit the web 2.0/web 3.0 crap already!

Sorry for the strong title of this post, but that’s how I cur­rently feel about the whole web 2.0/web 3.0 hype. Peo­ple who are shout­ing about, say­ing that some­thing is very ‘Web 2.0′ (or worse: web 3.0) make my skin crawl. Worse, it’s spread­ing like a virus, now every­thing needs to be ‘two point oh’. Stop it! You’re all act­ing silly, and you don’t know what you’re talk­ing about!

Let me explain to you my per­sonal position.

First came the Web 2.0

The term Web 2.0 was first coined at the 2004 Web 2.0 Con­fer­ence by Tim O’Reilly, defin­ing it as

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. Chief among those rules is this: Build appli­ca­tions that har­ness net­work effects to get bet­ter the more peo­ple use them. (This is what I’ve else­where called “har­ness­ing col­lec­tive intel­li­gence.”) (source)

How­ever, the term ‘Web 2.0′ has started to live a life of its own, becom­ing a hyped term. Web 2.0 means you have to spell your URL badly like flickr or tubmlr or tod­dlr or what­evr. It means you have to have users who gen­er­ate con­tent for your site. And that the users have the abil­ity to con­nect, mak­ing it a social, some­times col­lab­o­ra­tive net­work. Also, the site has to start with a beta period for invited peo­ple only –with users hav­ing to beg for invites every­where– fol­lowed by a long open-to-everyone pub­lic beta. In fact, there’s a big chance most web 2.0 ven­tures will never ever make it out of the beta stages.

And then there is the Web 3.0

And now the Next Best Thing Since Sliced Bread has been announced, and it’s called the Web 3.0.  The term is sketchy, as you can see in the Wikipedia def­i­n­i­tion:

Web 3.0 is one of the terms used to describe the evo­lu­tion­ary stage of the Web that fol­lows Web 2.0. Given that tech­ni­cal and social pos­si­bil­i­ties iden­ti­fied in this lat­ter term are yet to be fully realised the nature of defin­ing Web 3.0 is highly spec­u­la­tive. In gen­eral it refers to aspects of the inter­net which, though poten­tially pos­si­ble, are not tech­ni­cally or prac­ti­cally fea­si­ble at this time.

When peo­ple refer to the Web 3.0, they usu­ally think of things like the Seman­tic Web, and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. Some oth­ers coined the Mobile Web as the next big step in inter­net evo­lu­tion, but that move­ment seems to have evolved away.

So, what is my prob­lem with these terms? I’ll tell you. To me, this all is the full­fill­ment of the promise of the Web 1.0.

A (very brief) les­son in Web History

When Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web back in the days he cre­ated a means to access the data stored in the CERN archives. In fact, he tells us:

“I just had to take the hyper­text idea and con­nect it to the Trans­mis­sion Con­trol Pro­to­col and domain name sys­tem ideas and — ta-da! — the World Wide Web.”

Up untill that time, almost all our infor­ma­tion was struc­tured to be read by humans, to be dis­trib­uted on paper. The archives were full of papers, research doc­u­ments, notes, excerpts, etc. (Note that our cur­rent information-products vocab­u­lary still uses terms from the hardcopy-only day and age: papers, doc­u­ments…). What Sir Berners-Lee did how­ever, was add a unique fac­tor to it: the hyperlink.

The promise of hypertext

Lets grab the Wikipedia entry for the ‘hyper­link’, and look at its history:

The term “hyper­link” was coined in 1965 (or pos­si­bly 1964) by Ted Nel­son at the start of Project Xanadu. Nel­son had been inspired by “As We May Think,” a pop­u­lar essay by Van­nevar Bush. In the essay, Bush described a microfilm-based machine (the Memex) in which one could link any two pages of infor­ma­tion into a “trail” of related infor­ma­tion, and then scroll back and forth among pages in a trail as if they were on a sin­gle micro­film reel. The clos­est con­tem­po­rary anal­ogy would be to build a list of book­marks to top­i­cally related Web pages and then allow the user to scroll for­ward and back­ward through the list.

In a series of books and arti­cles pub­lished from 1964 through 1980, Nel­son trans­posed Bush’s con­cept of auto­mated cross-referencing into the com­puter con­text, made it applic­a­ble to spe­cific text strings rather than whole pages, gen­er­al­ized it from a local desk-sized machine to a the­o­ret­i­cal world­wide com­puter net­work, and advo­cated the cre­ation of such a net­work. Mean­while, work­ing inde­pen­dently, a team led by Dou­glas Engel­bart (with Jeff Rulif­son as chief pro­gram­mer) was the first to imple­ment the hyper­link con­cept for scrolling within a sin­gle doc­u­ment (1966), and soon after for con­nect­ing between para­graphs within sep­a­rate doc­u­ments (1968).

The very first thing I notice is that the first men­tion of the hyper­link is way back in 1965 (or ’64). So this isn’t a com­pletely new con­cept at all, and that its use and exper­i­ments with early hyper­links basi­cally describe the mod­ern world wide web.

The sec­ond thing that strikes me is that its pur­pose is to link data in a cog­ni­tive man­ner, based on the way we humans think. So basi­cally it allows us to relate infor­ma­tion (stored any­where on the net­work), based on our own logic.

Fol­low­ing these con­clu­sions, by adding hyper­text to the World Wide Web, he cre­ated a means to access any piece of data or infor­ma­tion stored on any machine con­nected to the net­work. Note the absence of the terms ‘pages’, ‘doc­u­ments’ and ‘sites’ in this last sentence.

User gen­er­ated content

The very first mod­ern web­browser (World­WideWeb, run­ning on the NeXTSTEP sys­tem) was a browser and an edi­tor all in one. In fact, the web was meant to be editable by users. What use would hav­ing access to all this infor­ma­tion be if you couldn’t enrich it with human cog­ni­tive logic, link­ing data and mak­ing sure that all other users can con­nect to the same net­work of links and data nodes you cre­ated? Exactly. Not much.

So the promise of the Web 1.0 was that it’d allow users to gen­er­ate and enrich con­tent, stored any­where on the world wide net­work, using their own human logic to con­nect the nodes. Does that sound famil­iar at all?

This is where the masses inter­vened, and when it all went downhill.

The decline of the web

The CERN wasn’t the only organ­i­sa­tion conected to the inter­net who was inter­ested in Berner-Lee’s appli­ca­tion. There were ser­val other research facil­i­ties, defence organ­i­sa­tions and uni­ver­si­ties who wanted to use the same tech­nol­ogy to pub­lish their own archives and data. Hang on –pub­lish­ing it? Isn’t pub­lish­ing it the old fash­ioned way of dis­trib­ut­ing hard­copy works? Exactly, and that’s where it all goes wrong. Peo­ple started devel­op­ing the World Wide Web as a pub­li­ca­tion plat­form, not to pro­vide access to data, but to pub­lish it. And pub­lish­ing it means that you cre­ate a store­front, and try to attract cus­tomers to your store in order to get them to access your prod­ucts (for free or payment).

So, you got sites, with doc­u­ments which were lit­tle less then digi­tised ver­sions of their had­copy orig­i­nals. The promise of hyper­text was reduced to a means to nav­i­gate the poten­tial user through the store and to access the prod­uct cat­a­logs, not the actual con­tent itself.

And from that point on, the web became a mass col­lec­tion of sites and doc­u­ments and pages. Because hyper­text was so ill used, the need for search engines became appar­ent, with webcrawler and altavista and some other early pio­neers paving the way for the Google’s and Yahoo’s and Livesearch com­pa­nies of today.

But the web 1.0 was never designed to be like that.

So, Web 2.0/3.0, it’s all the same: web 1.0!

And you can see it in the way Web 2.0 is used now. Yes, web 2.0 is a rev­o­lu­tion. But it is in the way we use the web itself. We finally embraced part of its poten­tial, what it was designed to do in the first place.

It’s like we pushed the car around for a few years, and only just found out what the silly metal keys in the egni­tion are for.

And Web 3.0, the Seman­tic Web isn’t Tim Berners-Lee’s pet project for noth­ing. The World Wide Web was designed to link data all across the network.

Fun­da­men­tally, no new tech­nol­ogy has been applied to ful­fill the Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 promises. The Web, as designed years ago, still func­tions as then. It’s just that we now dis­cov­ered how to use it prop­erly. We finally let go of the rather silly notion that the World Wide Web is a mass library of books, and that you need to browse through the cat­a­logs to get the book you need. And that infor­ma­tion isn’t con­nected unless we, human beings, con­nect it using our own logic, the same way our brain con­nects the dots.

We’ve finally learnt to appre­ci­ate and realise the promise of the Web 1.0.

And that is why I’m against the Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 crap. So next time you think it’s good to tell every­one that your idea is very ‘web 2.0′, please for­give me for scratch­ing pro­fusely and mak­ing vom­it­ing noises in the back…

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One Response to “Quit the web 2.0/web 3.0 crap already!”

1. JMorris says:

   15 November 2008 at 18:53

   Herko,

   This is one of those posts that, as a devel­oper, I have to say, RIGHT ON!

   Given that I spend a lot of time in the social media cir­cles, I’ve seen web 2.0 and 3.0 thrown around every­where. I’ve seen it used to describe AJAX effects, I’ve seen it used to describe busi­ness mod­els, I’ve even seen it used to describe web host­ing. Web 2.0 web host­ing? WTF?!

   It is truly refresh­ing to see that there are peo­ple out there who under­stand and appre­ci­ate what the WWW really is and what is is truly capa­ble of.

   I too am truly fed up with all the “two point oh” jar­gon. I’m equally fed up with peo­ple pimp­ing these new buzz-word labeled ser­vices and appli­ca­tions like they are some­thing new. To date, I haven’t seen any real inno­va­tion come to the WWW in many years. What I have seen is peo­ple take exist­ing tech­nol­ogy and finally use it in a log­i­cal manor, then slap a buzz­word badge on it.

   I bet­ter stop now before I go all out on my own rant. Great post! You are def­i­nitely going in my feed reader!
2. Cateva chestii de luat in seama says:

   25 November 2008 at 20:00

   […] chestii de luat in seama 25 Noiem­brie 2008 21:00 de ce web 2.0, web 3.0 si dis­cu­ti­ile despre ele sunt pur si simplu […]
3. Viitorul bloggingului [dubios] says:

   8 December 2008 at 18:46

   […] se îndreaptă blog­gin­gul, dar nu mă alegeam decât cu răspun­suri dez­in­tere­sate şi cu un arti­col tare despre web 2.0 şi 3.0, care nu sunt de fapt decât speci­fi­caţii ale web1.0 puse în […]

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