A sceptic Introduction

This listing is by no means complete. You can find links to sites that try to index all those new sites, but I don't see any sense in doing this. Most of these things are just me-too or I-do-it-a-bit-differently or I-have-just-remade-my-old-site to spend any time on them. Most of them will neve survive the first crunch to come or will be bought by others and integrated, or will change their business-model overnight.

I do not have the mobile gadgets for which a big part of these new web 2.0 services are built, but maybe this is just quite marginal and premature. A study showed that the most advanced mobile phones with all the new services were easier broken than normal tested machines that only incorporated a new service or program only after it has been thoroughly tested over time.

At one side Web 2.0 is just hype. The reasoning here goes that there is nothing new about web 2.0 but it makes it possible for firms to invest again, for programmers to find work again, for concepts to be dusted off again and for old webservices to be invented again. Web 2.0 is becoming huge and even better than the so called webservices and soap and xml and all the rest of that ultra-consultant-with-no-webexperience-but-huge-paycheck stuff. They present Web 2.0 as made for the people, by the people and with the people and those that will survice the meltdown (as was the case with the everything-will-be-ebizz hype of 2001) will be the leaders of tomorrow or will have obliged the leaders of today to change their way of thinking and programming. This avalanche of propaganda, hype and rethinking will influence other to adapt, how slowly that may be.

At another side, web 2.0 is a departure from the ever increasing complexity of databases and programming and backoffice and putting more of the strain of webrelated connections on the user and less on the server and the networks. This is a very good point to start with and it will facilitate the new servers and networks and backoffices that will be built upon this concept. For the users it will complicate things a bit - surely if they are behind firewalls and their posts are closed down to a be able to do next to nothing - as they may scramble to find the necessary plugins and user rights to do the things they should do and for which there is no alternative - as some browserfunctions are replaced by desktop functions (print, save, goto). This will become even more necessary as the transport of data through the web won't be stay as free as today if the telco's and ISP's have their way.

Web 2.0 is as much a concept and a hype, there is not one real definition about what web 2.0 is and what isn't. But who cares. The appliactions that are just hype willl feel the pressure from the real web2.0 applications and will have to change or go away. A sidenote is that many of things that are now called web 2.0 have already existed but written in perl or php. The problem with the first is that only a limited number of free hosters provide that service and the security problems with php are just exploding every day again in the face of a simple webmaster. People didn't made blogs, but homepages. They didn't have linkpages and feeds but iframes and favourites and they discussed in bulletin boards and email discussion lists. And they exchanged files in p2p and not online.

One of the biggest advantages of the web 2.0 storm on the web is that applications and databases from the 'old' form have to open themselves up to those new guys and let the spirit out of the bottle. It is impossible that for example even the Google guys with more money than they can count would have been able to develop inhouse the hundreds of applications and ideas that have been using the different Google applications and databases through their API (mash-ups). It surely puts them and their data at the forefront and in the heart of the web 2.0 movement. It is also thanks to an open API (application program interface) that some newcomers like flickr could establish themselves quite quickly and without huge investment as one of the motors and leaders of this revolution. The thinking before was more and more that somebody had to pay for each use of your database or interfacing your application. Some still do, but they are now in danger being left behind or having to play catch-up. The other variant of those open applications are the widgets, which are small desktop applications that integrate with online information bases.

Some of the web 2.0 sites and applications are also just used by a handful of people (some more internetwise than others) and I don't see any sense in them, but they are often not more than a 'I-have-also-a-web2.0thing-in-beta'. And things in alpha are only that and closed betas is for paranoids. The importance of web2.0 is the number of people that participate. The higher the number of users, the bigger are the beneficial effects of the proposed applications. A database of restaurant reviews or travel experiences is only important if not hundreds or thousands but millions of restaurants goers are being sent each month. Some of these services are already overspammed as they have only a limited number of users so that one or two intelligent spammers can take over the whole system very easily. It is only volume, huge volume that can more or less neutralise spamming and even then placement-spam (even through paid third persons) will be filling up these networks as they did with the wiki's and the open comment blogs.

One great part of the new things are webbased, but saying that everything will be solely webbased is an illusion and that will stay that way for still long time to come. You can never trust only the web with your most important data and files. And you wouldn't be the first server or service that lost all of its data or just disappears and in the conditions is written that as it is free there is nobody to blame. . .

And the biggest storm still has to be coming. Sincee the explosion of the internet, libel and reponsability have been the bread and butter for internetlaw. It was quite simple. The text on a website was the responsibility of the editor who was mostly the owner of the website. With web 2.0 it is all becoming very blurred as a site or wiki or social bookmarking or whatever social editing or popularity site can have as many responsabilities as active members ? The owner, the editor, the person putting in the contestable content ?

We can also foresee a new kind of viruses that will use javascripts and exploits to spread like wildfire. Not on pc's, not on servers, not on applications an sich but on corrupt or incorrect code placed on or linked to these new web 2.0 services. Passwordmanagement and clean code will become the essential factors for a secure web 2.0.

But enjoy the ride while you still can