Topic 2.0 – What is Web 2.0?

I am a little behind but I aim to catch up as soon as I can so without further ado, I present some of my initial thoughts on web 2.0.

Web 1.0

I think the simplest way to define what Web 2.0 is to me is to firstly define what Web 1.0 was to me. Web 1.0 was a simple relatively low band-width (by today’s standards) click and retrieve information distribution platform. For the most part the content principally consisted of static hard-coded HTML web pages that contained maybe some images but little by way of interactive elements and certainly minimal media content such as audio and video.

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 does not appear to be a strict standard, but a term used as a catch-all for a group of application concepts delivered via the web. The key concepts are that Web 2.0 is dynamic, interactive and can be media rich. It’s often a simple web interface that sits on top of a database application that can perform some complex operations in the background. A web 2.0 application can even encourage interaction and engagement with others. Some sites employ business models that are built on this idea of social networking. There are Web 2.0 database applications that offer enormous catalogues of video (Vimeo, Youtube, etc.) others offer reference and informational content (Wikipedia), others offer social interaction (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin). They almost all however, share two major commonalities firstly in terms of technical architecture they consist of a private database application that is interacted with by a user via a public facing web interface; secondly the content provided is either wholly or partly provided by the public, everyday users of the Internet.

My only major issue with the notion of Web 2.0 is the idea that it sounds like it is new, the 2.0 carries an implication of new technology whereas it is anything but. The protocols are the same, the core technologies aren’t different, however it is the scale and source of the content that is different. Web 2.0 may not strictly be a web standard, but it has a use as a term that at one promotes the idea of interactive web applications on the Internet and; two, the concept of you as the principal source of the interactive content. However the idea of interactive applications is not entirely new, but the availability and scale of the interaction are unprecednted. Even seemingly modern concepts such as Cloud Computing’s hosted services may sound like the next thing but as we’ll see even this is not a new concept.

Cloud Computing or Web 3.0?

Software, storage, and data processing all delivered as a service via the internet, is the latest thing in computing, the marketing push behind this approach has labelled these kinds of services as cloud computing. It is sweeping through datacenters on a global scale. We have Microsoft offering its Azure and Live hosted services, Google has Google Apps and G-Mail and even Amazon (yes the on-line book store) has its EC2 services hosting platform. All of these firms are selling hosted services, vast banks of CPU, storage and data processing capabilities available to any organisation that can afford them. Yet even this is not a new idea.

The Network is the Computer.

From its early days Sun Microsystems (now a division of Oracle) has had the following as its motto ‘The network is the computer’. From 1996-2000 a consortium of major computer corporations (Sun Microsystems, IBM, etc.) created the concept of a ‘Network Computer’ a device that had no hard disk or much by way of local processing capability and was constructed from very cheap components. Data would be stored and processed remotely and applications delivered via similar means. The project however failed, for two reasons firstly the average consumer network connection at the time was a 28.8Kb/s dial-up affair, and secondly the applications were closed so interoperability between each competing Network Computer offering and the data stored remotely was non-existant. Bring the clock forward and now almost 15 years later we are talking about similar concepts, with one distinct advantage, we have more bandwidth available to us.

Old technical concepts have a very funny habit of being marketed to us as a new product. This is certainly true of the Internet age. But as we can see technology is evolutionary old ideas are presented in a modern context.  The simple click and retrieve functionality of the early Internet has been replaced by rich interactive applications, in much the same way that early computers offered primitive and then richer functionality. As we progress through to the next iteration of connected technology the very idea of what a computer is, is about to be challenged. Devices like the iPad are a glimpse of that time.