[UFO Chicago] Why Web 2.0 is Hype, and that's a good thing.

[Nick Moffitt]

Jordan Bettis:
> 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?

There's nothing unique or new about "Web 2.0" that you can pin down, and
we should be glad of this.

There are two ways that standards bodies can operate: one is like the
Academie Francaise, and the other is the Oxford English Dictionary.  In
the former, you sit down with Learned Men (it always seems to be men,
doesn't it?) and Design an Ideal System.  In the latter, you send as
many people as you can to provide Evidence of Current Practice, going
back in history to find the root causes and meaning for the way things
are the way they are out in "the field". 

Linux is the way it is today because Linus was willing to say "If a
large number of standard Unix programs compile and work on Linux, we
really don't need to care about POSIX."  This freed everyone to explore
and experiment and come up with new things that worked well with the
whole Internet.  Had he slavishly tied Linux to POSIX, we may have found
it Yet Another OSF or something.

Web 2.0 is really nothing more than a press-quotable marketing slogan
for "Hey guys, the dot-com crash is over and we can get back to work!"
Most of the stuff that people think of under this umbrella is probably
transient, and you wouldn't want to rely on it surviving the next round
of domain name renewals.  So what?  Keep looking for new stuff and see
what *does* stick.  I think it's pretty much a tautology to say that Web
2.0 allows people to ignore Microsoft considering that my definition of
it is "Ignore Microsoft and get coding on new Web stuff instead".

It's interesting to note that at SVLUG in the 1990s, O'Reilly babbled
for a good long while about where he saw the next generation of Web
services. At that talk, he was really into the inter-operation of sites,
and kept enforcing the fact that with only an ISBN and some basic
knowledge of the URL structure, you can grab all sorts of cool data from
amazon.com about a particular work. I think he was really into XML-RPC
when it was up and coming, but now ORA is getting into the REST thing
(which is if anything a *return* to nice-looking predictable URLs and
uncluttered ways of presenting information).

-- 
"Some of us figured out in the 1950s                        Nick Moffitt
that blacklists were a bad idea.                      nick at teh.entar.net
Some of us have that lesson still ahead of us."
           -- John Gilmore, on RBLs.