[UFO Chicago] "Microsoft is dead"

[Jordan Bettis]

On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 07:24:54PM -0500, Brian Sobolak wrote:
> Jordan Bettis wrote:
> >On Tue, Apr 10, 2007 at 08:38:13PM -0500, Brian Sobolak wrote:
> >
> >>is Web 2.0 perhaps more than we
> >>think--the potential end of the Microsoft hegemony?  
> >
> >Web 2.0 is Everything and Nothing. If something is deemed
> >at a certain point in time as being beneficial by the 
> >Web 2.0 crowd then it will be considered, at that time,
> >and with full benefit of hindsight, part of Web 2.0. 
> >
> >Not so? Prove me wrong. Give me a concise and immutable
> >definition of Web 2.0, preferably one that does not
> >include a host of technologies that predate "Web 1.0."
> 
> The definitive technological advance of Web 2.0 is the XMLHttpRequest 
> object, which enabled websites to substantially update a webpage without 
> requiring a complete reload of a web page.  It is the foundation of many 
> sites that wear the "Web 2.0" banner.

Ok, so "Web 2.0" is a subset of Ajax? The XMLHttpRequest is the X in Ajax,
so why on earth do we need another buzzword? According to that stream of
bullshit O'Reilly wrote, stuff like Wikis and Blogs are part of "Web 2.0"
even though most of them have no Ajax at all in them. So according to 
O'Reilly, Ajax -- or even just the use of XMLHttpRequest -- is not the
defining feature of Web 2.0. Ajax, according to O'Reilly, is a subset
of Web 2.0, so again, what is the unambiguous and immutable thing that
makes Web 2.0 unique?

> The different between "old" Mapquest and "new" Google Maps substantially 
> highlights this difference.

They look at mapquest and compare it to google maps and decide that google
maps is better and is therefore Web 2.0.
 
> Of course Web 2.0 is a sloppy and loosely applied label to a host of 
> technologies.  But for me, it is quite a substantial advance over the past.

\ldots{}

> Simple example:  I weigh myself and track my exercise every day.  In the 
> past, this was a problem to make sure that the data (a spreadsheet) was 
> sufficiently replicated between the 3-4 computers (FreeBSD, OSX, 
> Windows) I use on a regular basis.
> 
> I now use a Google spreadsheet to do it.  It works perfectly.  When I 
> want to do analysis, I can easily download the data into whatever 
> computer I happen to use at the moment.  It's a godsend.
> 
> To me, there is something very different about that -- and I'm not going 
> to discuss the collaborative possibilities I could enable too.  (c.f. a 
> Backpack writeboard <http://www.backpackit.com/>)
> 
> Could I edit a spreadsheet online pre "Web 2.0"?  Not that I am aware of.

Well, that's the problem again. You could have put it into a wiki in
the mid 1990s, way before the late 1990s internet boom. But a wiki is
Web 2.0 so it could be said that you couldn't do something like that
easily before Web 2.0. But of course, when wikis were first made there
wasn't a "Web 1.0" yet and the "Web 2.0" moniker didn't get applied to
Wikis until over ten years after their creation, when it was obvious
that they were a Big Thing.

Basically what Ajax is is an attempt to use a variety of add-ons to
the Web model to turn a formerly stateless and synchronous
client/server model into a stateful, asynchronous one. This is novel
(of course statelessness was addressed years and years ago with
cookies) and the result has been that GUI web applications are now
almost as useful as desktop GUI applications originally were on the
Apple Lisa. The Web 2.0 crowd (rightly) sees this as a Big Thing and
it, like Wikis, get absorbed into the collective.

But the fact remains that Web 2.0 is a hopelessly empty and useless
buzzword not because the things it purports to encompass are not real
improvements but because they are discrete threads of development with
widely varying ages that often have nothing to do with eachother
except that they are currently hip and therefore candidates for
inclusion in the Web 2.0 neologism.

-- 
Jordan Bettis -- Chicago Il.
  <http://neighborhoods.chicago.il.us>                  
    Photographs of Life in the Neighborhoods of Chicago