What's Web 2.0?
RIVER BENDER - May, 2007
The Internet is a wonderful invention and keeps getting better despite all the bad aspects. A friend of mine recently gave up using it because of all the pornography and junk. I agreed with him about some of the content but felt sorry that he was now out of touch without e-mail and could no longer access the wealth of good information on the web. How could anyone go back to a world where answers are not readily available on any topic? I can't count the times we've gotten help with a health problem, a broken appliance, a legal problem and numerous other problems using the Internet? I no longer have to answer "I don't know" to my wife's questions since I can always "google up" something. It may not always be correct. I think the benefits of the Internet far outweigh the bad side.
The Internet keeps changing and it's difficult to follow the latest technology unless you make a conscious effort. Everyone now knows what googling is, or what a blog or spam is but you to have to do some homework to keep up with IT terms like VoIP, RSS, API and Web 2.0. What, you don't even know what IT is?
Let me digress, because it appears that history may be repeating. I've been a computer techie ever since I carried a slide rule around on my belt in college. My earliest hands-on productive years using a computer was in the '70s sitting at a teletypewriter terminal at work or at a portable acoustic-coupled terminal at home dialed into a remote mainframe computer at 150 bits-per-second. I recall questioning why anyone would want faster speed since they couldn't read any faster. Of course there were no pictures. The remote computer service was called "time-shared" because in the '70s computers were so expensive that owners had to sell time on them to afford them.
Then along came mini computers followed by microprocessors in the '80s and time-sharing died because personal computers became powerful and cheap. One didn't have to learn a program language anymore because of the myriad of software that became available. A lot of it was copied illegally in the early days until IBM began releasing it unprotected.
The Internet finally opened to the public in 1990 and its predecessor, the government's ARPANET, was discontinued. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) proliferated but it wasn't until '94 that CoastalNet became the first ISP in New Bern. The worldwide Web became a wealth of information that could be obtained using browsers like Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Google's search engine but computing of applications remained largely within clients' PCs.
A new era may now be emerging called Web 2.0. Despite the term being around since 2004 it's still controversial and some say it's nothing more than a buzzword. Try googling "web 2.0" and you'll see what I mean. But one can see that Google themselves appear to be spearheading the movement and Microsoft is right on their heels. Here's what I think Web 2.0 is: It's akin to time-sharing of computers in the '70s. For example, instead of everybody installing application software like MS Office on their PC they can now use Google's free web-based application called "Open Office." Or instead of installing MS Outlook Express mail software one can use Google's web-based G-mail. This is an oversimplification since there's more to the way information will be handled in Web 2.0 but we'll just have to wait and see if it all happens. I was once a proponent of Bell Lab's "bubble memory" but it never flew.