> I normally don't do this....but I thought I will share this link where Tim O'Reilly talks about what is web 2.0 and its implications. By talking with him I clarified lot of the fuzziness and lack of clarifty that I had in my mind about Web 2.0 and its future. >
For all the beating the Web 2.0 term takes [ try reading the Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2 ], I think the coolest way of putting it was by Nathan Zeldes, a Principal Engineer in Intel's Information Technology group: -- I participated in a conference of the Israel Knowledge Managers' forum yesterday. Yigal Chamish, founder and mover of the forum, was using his tiny digital camera to snap stills and videos of the attendees in action; he'd go to his notebook every now and then and, using its wireless link, would upload the stills to Flickr and the videos to YouTube. When I saw this (he was sitting in a seat right in front of me) I used my Blackberry to find Yigal's photostream on Flickr, downloaded a photo of myself in my seat (taken minutes earlier), and emailed it to my wife back at home, so she'd see where I was. - http://blogs.intel.com/it/2007/02/what_this_web_20_is_all_about.html -- Paul Graham's article on Web 2.0 had a small paragraph hidden away: -- The ultimate target is Microsoft. What a bang that balloon is going to make when someone pops it by offering a free web-based alternative to MS Office. Hint: the way to create a web-based alternative to Office may not be to write every component yourself, but to establish a protocol for web-based apps to share a virtual home directory spread across multiple servers. Or it may be to write it all yourself. - http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html -- Google vs. Microsoft does really exemplify why the Web 2.0 term is paid attention to, which is best profiled by Joel Spolsky's article: How Microsoft lost the API War: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html [ And somewhat visualized by eyeOS: http://eyeos.org/ as it puts it: Web Operating System :-) demo at http://demo.eyeos.org/ ] And taking Paul Graham very seriously, we have Google Gears: -- Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline. Gears provides three key features: * A local server, to cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) without needing to contact a server * A database, to store and access data from within the browser * A worker thread pool, to make web applications more responsive by performing expensive operations in the background - http://code.google.com/apis/gears/ -- and the press release: -- Google Gears marks an important step in the evolution of web applications because it addresses a major user concern: availability of data and applications when there's no Internet connection available, or when a connection is slow or unreliable. As application developers and users alike want to do more on the web—whether it's email or CRM or photo editing—enhancements that make the browser environment itself more powerful are increasingly important. "With Google Gears we're tackling a key limitation of the browser in order to make it a stronger platform for deploying all types of applications and enabling a better user experience in the cloud," said Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive Officer of Google. "We believe strongly in the power of the community to stretch this new technology to the limits of what's possible and ultimately emerge with an open standard that benefits everyone." - http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/gears_20070530.html -- When Google makes its Web Operating System or Operating System Cloud or similar available, you could probably call it Web 2.0, since Windows 2.0 wouldn't sound too cool anyway :-) Raul
