The Challenges of Web 2.0
So I've been doing some pondering over the past week or so, and wondered if you guys might share some thoughts...
We have a good idea what Web 2.0 is all about, and some people have proffered ideas about what Web 3.0 will be like - personally I'm not convinced by either, but thats not quite this forum topic. Given the general definitions of Web and Web 2.0, I'm trying to come up with the challenges faced in each era. My thought process being to see which challenges are continuing, which challenges are solved and which challenges are new - so we can hypothesise that if some of those challenges are solved, what the new era would be. So here's a brief start - please add your thoughts in;
Web 1.0
* Reach and Range (getting more people connected.)
* Design Issues (remember creating HTML before CSS?)
Web 2.0
* Classification (?through folksonomy)
* Quality Management (With all this user generated content, who's going to check if its any good?)
I think the web was built
I think the web was built out of two challenges. One was information organization. The other was platform agnostic document formats. Prior to the web, the then current approach entailed several incompatible document formats which needed the right hardware/software combination to be usable. Organizationally, documents were kept in hiearchies, or in the case of previous hypertext style systems, the link structure was centralized. What was unique about Tim Berners-Lee's hypertext was that the link structure was encapsulated in the documents. And there was no exhaustive directory to keep the system in good working order. Hence we have less functional one-way links (other previous systems, had links which were reversible, had multiple targets, etc), and broken links litter the web.
the second generation, I think comes in three parts. The first http/html client was not a 'browser', it was an editor. Pages could be edited as you viewed them. 'Web 2.0' recaptured this aspect to some degree using different methods. Wiki's and Blogs chief amongst them. The approach to information organization was updated with things like the 'folksonomy' as you mentioned. Tagging, etc. And static documents gave way to interactive applications. The additioal tools for information organization can be seen as a response to the deluge of information the additional connectivety of web 1.0 brought with it. And the addition of interactive content to static documents might indicate the attractiveness and functionality of distributed, cross-platform technology: 'it was so nice with documents, how about have our apps that way too ...'
from a recent Joel Spolsky article
from a recent Joel Spolsky article.
They were not designed with interoperability in mind. The assumption, and a fairly reasonable one at the time, was that the Word file format only had to be read and written by Word. That means that whenever a programmer on the Word team had to make a decision about how to change the file format, the only thing they cared about was (a) what was fast and (b) what took the fewest lines of code in the Word code base. The idea of things like SGML and HTML—interchangeable, standardized file formats—didn’t really take hold until the Internet made it practical to interchange documents in the first place; this was a decade later than the Office binary formats were first invented. There was always an assumption that you could use importers and exporters to exchange documents. In fact Word does have a format designed for easy interchange, called RTF, which has been there almost since the beginning. It’s still 100% supported.
Other parts of the article talk about the optimizations that can be made with this assumption in mind, and the reasons they were made. Largely, because of old, slow hardware.