Four years on from the first serious attempt to define
it, there is no firm consensus about what constitutesWeb
2.0.Within the past few months, it has been
described by senior industry commentators as "a major trend that is
building steadily" and "a bagful of old technologies under a new
name".
Companies identified by analysts such as Forrester and Gartner
as eager to
harness Web 2.0 seem to be less interested in technology, than
the potential of "social networking", modeled on
Facebook and its peers, to
improve collaboration within the company, and to encourage
customers to give up information about themselves, and feedback
about products and services.
But other companies, facing an expected cut in IT budgets, are
excited by the prospects of equipping end-users with the power to
write their own applications with freely-downloadable tools and
components.
Inventor of the World Wide Web
Tim
Berners-Lee has said that some of the supposedly defining
characteristics of Web 2.0, such as collaboration and user
involvement, are what the web was supposed to be about all along.
He has pointed out, as others have, that Amazon was incorporating
user-generated content (book reviews began in 1996) and
Rest
(Representational State Transfer) in its developments long
before the term Web 2.0 came into use. So in effect, we are simply
at a later stage of Web 1.0.
Meanwhile the dawn of Web 3.0 is already being proclaimed by
excitable technology columnists, marketing people clutching at the
next big thing, and developers who want the Web 2.0 brand
buried.
In 2005, respected developers' handbook publisher Tim O'Reilly
set down
in detail what separated Web 1.0 from Web 2.0.
However, he had to acknowledge sufficient exceptions, Amazon
among them, to suggest that something less than a full generational
shift had occurred: "There are many areas of Web 2.0, where the
'2.0-ness' is not something new, but rather a fuller realisation of
the true potential of the web platform".
O'Reilly identified Google as "the standard bearer for Web 2.0",
and pointed out the differences between it and predecessors such as
Netscape, which tried to adapt for the web the business model
established by Microsoft and other PC software suppliers.
Google "began its life as a native web application, never sold
or packaged, but delivered as a service, with customers paying,
directly or indirectly... none of the trappings of the old software
industry are present." There were no scheduled software releases,
"just continuous improvement" (or perpetual beta, as O'Reilly later
dubbed it).
Perhaps the most important breakthrough was Google's willingness
to relinquish control of the user-end of the transaction, instead
of trying to lock them in with proprietary technology and
restrictive licensing.
O'Reilly took a second Web 2.0 principle from Peer-to-Peer
pioneer BitTorrent, which works by completely decentralising the
delivery of files, with every client also functioning as a server.
The more popular a file, is, the faster it can be served, since
there are more users providing bandwidth and fragments of the file.
Thus, "the service automatically gets better the more people use
it".
BitTorrent also illustrates the way that customers will
willingly serve themselves, and in doing so serve others. But Web
2.0 goes much further. Taking another model from open source, users
are treated as "co-developers", actively encouraged to contribute,
and monitored in real time to see what they are using, and how they
are using it.
Taking advantage of this, instead of working to a three-year
release cycle, Web 2.0 developers can come up with a feature in the
morning, write it in the afternoon, put it out overnight, and wait
for the response the next day to decide whether to continue with it
or withdraw it. O'Reilly says scripting languages like
Perl,
Python and
Ruby are optimised for this kind of programming.
"Until Web 2.0 the learning curve to creating websites was quite
high, complex, and a definite barrier to entry," says the third of
our triumvirate of Tims, Tim Bray, director of Web Technologies at
Sun Microsystems. "Now the new tools that are web oriented, like
PHP and Rails, have no other objective than building websites,
easier and faster, and the effect is that the number of potential
developers is growing."
Web 2.0 takes some of its philosophical underpinning from James
Surowiecki's book The Wisdom of Crowds, which asserts that the
aggregated insights of large groups of diverse people can provide
better answers and innovations than individual experts.
Jakob Nielsen, regarded as the foremost authority on
human-computer interaction ("usability"), has no patience with the
wisdom of crowds approach, when it comes to business application
development. "Employees are pre-vetted: they've been hired and thus
presumably have a minimum quality level. In contrast, on the Web,
most people are bozos and not worth listening to".
The active contribution users make should not be over-estimated
Nielsen quotes figures from an AT&T study which found that 90%
of users are "lurkers", who consume but don't produce, and 9% make
occasional contributions, meaning that just 1% do most of the
work.
And as AT&T researcher Will Hill observed, "unfortunately,
those people who have nothing better to do than post on the
internet all day long are rarely the ones who have the most
insights."
In practice, even fewer than 1% of people may be making a useful
contribution - but these may be the most energetic and able members
of a very large community. In 2006 1,000 people, just 0.003% of its
users, contributed around two-thirds of Wikipedia's edits.
Nielsen's
December 2007 Alertbox is a long and intemperate attack on the
dangers he believes Web 2.0 presents for good interface design,
good development, and business integrity. Nielsen is also notable
for earlier attacks on
Ajax (Asynchronous Javascript and XML), one of the pillars of
Web 2.0 development.
Ajax speeds up response times by enabling just part of a page to
be updated, instead of downloading a whole new page. Nielsen's
objections include that this breaks the "back" button - the ability
to get back to where you've been, which Nielsen says is the second
most used feature in Web navigation.
Ajax is one of the technologies used to create Rich Internet
Applications - closer to the desktop experience than the
traditional Web - which are characteristic of Web 2.0. Others
include Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight. Whatever Nielsen's
criticisms (and he is even harder on Flash), Ajax is at least based
on international standards. JavaScript/Jscript is maintained by the
European Computer Manufacturers Association XML, HTML and XTML, the
XMLHttpRequest API, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS, used to
separate presentation from content), by the
W3C.
"Everybody who has a Web browser has got that platform," says
Berners-Lee, in a
podcast available on IBM's developerWorks site. "So the nice
thing about it is when you do code up an Ajax implementation, other
people can take it and play with it."
REST, increasingly used for web services in preference to the
more cumbersome SOAP in
web service development, is frequently cited as another
characteristic of Web 2.0. First defined in 2000, it makes use of
HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol to interface with resources
identified by their URIs. For Tim Bray, "integration is probably
the number one problem we face, and REST is probably the
solution."
But far from being new, it has been pointed out that the World
Wide Web itself is just one very large RESTful application.
So it is easy to sympathise with Berners-Lee when he says (in
the same podcast), that Web 2.0 means "building stuff using the Web
standards which have been produced by all these people working on
Web 1.0, plus Javascript of course. Web 2.0 for some people means
moving some of the thinking client-side, so making it more
immediate. But the idea of the Web as interaction between people is
really what it was designed to be."
Which has not stopped his W3C colleagues taking to the road with
a hectic schedule of presentations in the early months of this
year, all arguing that Web 2.0 is a step on the way to the
Semantic Web, a long-standing W3C
initiative to create a standards-based framework able to understand
the links between data which is related in the real world, and
follow that data wherever it resides, regardless of application and
database boundaries.
They point out that Web 2.0 applications combine all kinds of
data from all kinds of places - so-called
mashing up. Unfortunately, W3C member Steven Pemberton says,
"by putting a lot of work into a website, you commit yourself to
it, and lock yourself into their data formats too. This is similar
to data lock-in when you use a proprietary program. Moving comes at
great cost. Try installing a new server, or different Wiki
software."
The problem with Web 2.0, Pemberton says, is that it "partitions
the web into a number of topical sub-webs, and locks you in,
thereby reducing the value of the network as a whole."
How do you decide which social networking site to join? he asks.
"Do you join several and repeat the work?" With the
Semantic Web's Resource
Description Framework (RDF), you won't need to sign up to separate
networks, and can keep ownership of your data. "You could describe
it as a CSS for meaning: it allows you to add a small layer of
markup to your page that adds machine-readable semantics."
The problems with Web 2.0 lock-in which Pemberton describes,
were illustrated when a prominent member of the active 1%, Robert
Scoble, ran a routine called Plaxo to try to extract details of his
5,000 contacts from Facebook, in breach of the site's terms of use,
and had his account disabled. Although he has apparently had his
account reinstated, the furore has made the issue of Web 2.0 data
ownership and portability fiercely topical.
These issues, along with privacy, are being tackled by
Dataportability.org, which
aims to put existing standards "in context of each other so that
consumers, suppliers and developers can more easily understand and
implement them as an end-to-end data portability solution".
Facebook has opened itself up to the extent of supplying APIs,
which allow external developers to provide applications for its
users. But when Google announced its OpenSocial set of APIs, which
will enable developers to create portable applications and bridges
between social networking websites, Facebook was not among those
taking part. Four years after O'Reilly attempted to define Web 2.0,
Google, it seems, remains the standard-bearer, while others are
forgetting what it was supposed to be about.
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