Web 2.0 In Perspective
What we learned during Web 1.0 was that we can offer free web services and make money with ads. Remember Tripod and Geocities? These were the precursors to Blogger and Myspace–the model is the same today: exchange freehosted web publishing for content. Torturous ads in exchange for free services was common practice for Web 1.0, (and it still is) but the torture was somewhat justified. Bandwidth was a deal at $6/gigabyte and there weren’t as many advertisers willing to pay for clicks, not to mention coding the backend in Perl was torture too, so when you got popups and banners it wasn’t such a bad deal. Web 1.0 was ugly in other ways too–you could get away with a few rainbow “hr” tags and call yourself a web designer. I believe what changed the perception of the internet was online banking. When people could see the money in their bank account online, then you could begin to imagine money and important information zooming around the world at the speed of light.
Why is Web 2.0 important now–who cares? Many people felt the brunt of the “dot-bomb”. There was a disconnect between the people that “got” the internet and the people that weren’t there yet. The ideas were there, the visionaries were there, the internet was there, raring to go–but by and large the world wasn’t ready. The closest art analogy I can think of would be when Peggy Guggenheim validated Jackson Pollock. Jackson Pollock rose quickly to international art superstardom, burned too bright and then bombed (drunk driving into a tree) but his successor de Kooning (who surprisingly dated Pollock’s crash-survivor girlfriend) did very well and enjoyed a long, successful career. This world now recognizes Google’s success and thereby the significance of internet, and just as Hans Hoffman spread the ideas of cubism and modern art to universities around the world, we are now sharing our take on Web 2.0 with blogs.
What is Web 2.0 now?
1. Web 2.0 is cleaner. The world was ready for the web to mature and Google Adsense allowed that to happen.
 “I do not seek. I find.” –Pablo Picasso |
The door was opened for everyone to take out ads on the internet, on websites without “excessive profanity“, spawning new, collaborative connections: high caliber advertising feeding higher caliber publishing, and conversely, high caliber publishing providing fertile ground for higher caliber ads. Google also came up with the “bad neighborhood” concept. With Google’s traffic output as high as it is, it makes sense to follow Google’s guidelines. |
It is not so much the ingenuity of the code behind Adsense, but Google’s prominent deployment. The result? The internet gets better with each passing day.
2. Web 2.0 is thinner. It’s hard to miss the Salesforce.com slogan: No Software. While somewhat misleading, the point is made. Web 2.0 is your new operating system within an operating system. Web 2.0 allows you to get thinner.
Years ago in NY I was reviewing a concept for a project that would manage affiliate links, banking, bandwidth, traffic, earnings–a Swiss Army knife money making machine. This was all going to be done with HTML. The concept begged for interactive, realtime graphics, minute-by-minute measurements, statistical analysis. Years after investing all this time and money in code, will you be able to get graphical and interactive without starting over from scratch? At the time I was thinking a Windows client would be a better choice than HTML. Applets were an early failure, Flash was still too “Macromedia Director” and Javascript was too buggy. Really I wasn’t expecting AJAX. For a long time HTML with tables was good enough for everybody.
Shortly thereafter we all got hit hard by email worms. I was using Opera at the time for my email and it just got to be insane downloading (with DSL) hours and hours of email worms. My temporary solution was the freeware webmail application that came with my hosting account–but instead of downloading an hour of worms, I spent an hour clicking checkboxes to delete the worms. Somehow I found a company called Norada and I have been using their service ever since. Norada was unique in that it allowed me to shift-select emails for deletion (can Gmail do this?) If I had to erase 25 worms, all I had to do was select the top one, scroll down, shift-select the last one, and bam–they were all checkbox selected! This was some fancy Javascripting and no doubt very Web 2.0 for 2003. As we now know the worm problem was shortlived–servers started blocking them mid-squirm. My emailbox has been clean ever since.
Newly back from NY–the drive on my desktop finally died. All my old email was gone–love letters, poems, family pictures, old NURBS models, videogame graphics I made in college, old scraps of code, ancient DOS batch files and ANSI artwork. No doubt I was crushed–but this is what happened… I realized that I was one step closer to thin computing mecca: a tiny, silent, driveless computer with an internet browser operating system! If I dropped it off a building crashing it into tiny plastic particles of street sweeping fun, my files would still be safe–my email, my websites, my files, my code, my contacts, my bookmarks would all be online.
Thanks to Web 2.0 applications like Norada’s Solve360, Site5’s Netadmin (CPanel), and Wordpress, I’m one step closer to being free of my desktop forever. This is what AJAX will do for most of us. I should be able to walk laptop-free into any internet cafe in the world and get work done with minimal fuss, same as if I were sitting at home sipping Folgers instant coffee (Note: you might still suffer from rogue-keystroke-recorder-paranoia, but that’s beside the point.) Will we be composing music, editing videos, forming 3D models by way of some AJAX goodness? Yes, but first we need the basics: better web-based file management, better graphics (AJAX Gimp?) and whatever other tools, to replace what still resides on your harddrive that you can’t quite live without yet. Which leads me to…
3. Web 2.0 is hosting. Now in Web 2.0 more than ever, hosting is important. Hosting has always been important, but now it will be important to more people for the reasons stated above and for reasons that I will get to later in this post. Just as you were careful with your PC, now you want your sysadmin to be careful instead. You want your host to be one step ahead of hacks and attacks, you want the upstream bills to be paid, you want the power to stay on, you want backups, you want the latest software, and you also want AJAX. Right now my host–Site5–is installing the latest version of FastCGI and Ruby on Rails on my server. Site5 was the first host in the world to offer Ruby on Rails hosting. If you want to try the latest AJAX applications–like Typo–you’ll need Ruby on Rails installed on your server correctly.
When the early adopters are non-geeks, something big could be brewing. The Web 2.0 interface should be intuitive. The reason there are so many millions of people on Myspace–it’s relatively easy to use. Also, Web 2.0 hosting needs to keep the jargon under control if it wants to go mainstream. Case in point is Site5’s Netadmin. They took Cpanel’s (relatively) simple interface and streamlined it even more. They compressed all the features into pretty, collapsible menus–that was genius. The result is a sleek, clean control panel that’s not intimidating–but still, while it’s the least intimidating hosting control panel that I’ve seen, there still could be a “Lite” version for the n00bs.
4. Web 2.0 is ad-driven. All the TV money that we’ve been waiting for all these years–well, it’s finally here. We can congratulate the success of Google’s stock (Pay-Per-Click gone mainstream) but we can’t forget to acknowledge every individual that has contributed to the success of the internet.
It seems that free is just not good enough anymore. Take a look at Blingo. Take the $2 billion that News Corp. has budgeted for Fox Interactive Media and divide that by 40 million Myspace friends–that’s $50 per friend. Will that be enough money to keep this website sticky?
From an advertising perspective, when the web is decentralized *and* ad-driven, you get a voluntary, granular endorsement, not an algorithmically generated one. Web 2.0 is an army of publishers threshing through ads, making appropriate connections, not inappropriate ones. It would be very Web 2.0 of Myspace to let users choose their own ads in order to share the resulting revenue; the users (ie: publishers) would stay and the advertising would be better targeted. It would also be very Web 2.0 to show Myspacers how much bandwidth they are burning. Help these people understand why their music sounds so terrible, because it’s not even streaming at 128kbps. Additionally, if a user wants to “opt-out of advertising”, do what Six Apart did. Will Myspace wait for Web 2.0 to force the issue or will it lead the way?
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In the meantime the Myspaces and Geocities of the world provide the training wheels for the bikes driving Web 2.0. Newbie users of a social network should ask themselves, “Who owns the domain?” You might say, “Well, Myspace gives me a permanent directory, and so does Flickr.” I say, “You don’t own the domain that holds and profits from your content: your words, your friends, your music, etc. Why not?” |
