Web 2.0? Try Web 1.01.
If it’s about the users, then it’s about independence, stupid.
Name the four or five online services/web sites you use daily. I bet among others you’ll find Flickr, Yahoo!, Google, blogspot and wordpress.com (for those blogging/publishing online) in most peoples’ lists and in some, the most ridiculous of them all, Twitter.
What’s wrong with all those sites? They’re centralised. And for no good reason. It’s not like they are providing original information, in the way the BBC, CNN or blogs do. If Web 2.0 finally gets a meaning then according to many it’s probably user-generated content, social media etc. Yet those very same services that more or less represent the leading examples of Web 2.0 technology and phenomenon have — ironically — nothing to do with users, but with corporations.
And that’s the problem. The technology is there to do amazing stuff with the Web, to provide more information, in medium-independent ways, with rich meta-data and interactive presentations. And all that could be done today with open technologies. Yet something stops us: We’ve got stuff like W3Cs RDF, but we opt to thoroughly abuse RSS creating yet another mess. We could already have a comprehensive open RIA framework based on Javascript, XML and SVG, but we rely on proprietary Flash and Flex and the kludge that is AJAX. We could have fully tagged information and a truly decentralised web, hyperlinked to the hilt and scoured by search engines, yet we rely on a few centralised databases while some companies make millions billions.
Take for example Flickr or YouTube: web sites that hold media. These are web sites that typically allow you to specify your friends and let them see some of your data, while others are publicly viewable. Something like Facebook, but limited to media. They also allow tagging. Suppose you’ve already spent many hours uploading and tagging images on Flickr and that tomorrow Flickr decides to charge for its service because it’s not doing well or you wish to migrate to another provider by ImageCorp Inc. Can you do it? Now, you might want to move all your images to your brand new web site under your own personal domain JoeSixpack.info. You may want to accompany the information with text (a blog entry) or video, tag everything properly, and add all the meta-data you want so that a search engine could spider everything later.
In another example, consider Facebook. How do you feel letting a company know of all your personal information for free, when they can easily change their terms of service and decide to sell your information later. Have you properly read the ToS before using it? And, more to the point, do we need Facebook considering we could use FOAF in our own web sites in so many different ways? So it boils down to services providing space and letting the users free to choose what to do with it.
Chaos? You bet. And that’s the point. Individual, unique presentations, innovative, decentralised, independent web sites, linking to each other, providing very rich meta-data for spiders and search engines. The Semantic Web. RDF finally used for something more than FOAF, DOAC, DOAP, SIOC and other currently irrelevant four letter acronyms.
Decentralisation (also) means Profit
‘Profit’ for Everyone. The need to decentralise is not at all about freedom and independence at the cost of profit. It’s about freedom and independence, period. And, sure, a decentralised Semantic Web would probably diminish the importance of places like Flickr or YouTube as they stand today, but it’d still mean big money for more people. It just requires a different way of making it. Search engines could still make money. Ad providers could still make money. Even a service like Flickr could be part of it and be profitable. A decentralised Semantic Web would mean that while you could choose to have Flickr as your service provider, there’d be no restrictions in place prohibiting you from taking your data from Flickr to Googlr or Microsoftr or cosmixr if you wanted to. It’d mean you could setup your own domain and web site and keep your data + meta-data there.
We need the Software
Back in 2000 I spent one night writing a file-based photo gallery php script, mostly to play around with php. I used the program for two years before ditching it when my university changed its policy on research associate pages and forcing me to remove all non-academic material from my site. Since then I’ve been meaning to rewrite it, properly, so that it provides RDF meta-data of the pictorial information available. I started doing so about a year ago using RoR (again in order to gain a better understanding of the language and framework better). Perhaps this time when it’s completed later this year it’ll be ready for release.
We need good, easy to use software for people to use and we need to make sure that our software leverages existing technology in a way that allows the Semantic Web to come to life. That would really be Web 2.0. Until then, all those flashy fades, scrolls, AJAX/Flash displays you keep seeing, all this noise about centralised services like Digg, Twitter, Flickr, etc. leave me cold. It’s just Web 1.01 if you ask me. Open data + meta-data is the future of any service provider and RDF + XML is probably the means to do so. Google’s Eric Schmidt seems to understand this need for openness. The days of centralised services may not be numbered (people will always need service providers for one thing or another), but I hope that the days when centralised, incompatible services where the user cannot retrieve his data in interpretable form are soon to be over.
Wow! ωραίο..
Nice post! Dugg, reddited and buzzed =p
Openness, compatibility, transferability – this is the stuff we all should demand from our web services. The rest of the ‘maximalist’ Web2.0 vision is nice – if mostly ideological -, but also a bit murky and probably unappealing to the average user. When it comes to software, ease of use is truly crucial, and the FLOSS community should put even more effort into it, lest totally decentralized alternatives lock out more people than today’s hobbled Web2.0 services lock in.
It’s a mess, a huge mess. Unfortunately, it will not be solved any time soon. When a better alternative comes out it’s either too difficult for mass adoption, or the major browsers do not support it.
@yorgo: Maximalism? What I wrote about users (in the context of Web 2.0, assuming it’s all to do about users) can be written about corporations etc. Think of it at the network level instead of trying to associate it with social ideology. Higher semantic connectivity between nodes themselves instead of the server-client model with an internal, opaque connectivity map within the server (which is the case now). I don’t think it’s utopian or ‘the views of a pinko’. On the contrary: a decentralised net is, arguably, ‘topologically’ closer to libertarianism than communism :)
Is what I’m describing pretty far from what we’ve got today? Absolutely. But I think it’s only software (or lack thereof) that makes it hard to imagine this being accessible and useable by the average user. The technology is there, we just lack the standards, the focus, the software.
Instead of thinking of the extreme case (personal servers running at home and connected to the ‘net at absolutely mind-boggling speeds) think of competing web space/hosting vendors such as Dreamhost/Lunarpages/etc., that provide comprehensive Facebook/Flickr/Youtube/Google docs features to everyone, through space on servers running a number of programs (commercial maybe, the user might be able to select between alternatives) all conforming to some open standard and that let users upload their photos, videos, texts, information etc, set access permissions and — -crucially — manage relationships with other sites etc. You do that today, multiple times, when you upload stuff to Flickr AND Facebook AND some other site, when you add your buddies/friends/acquaintances etc. Of course it’s all linked: openness is very crucial and it’s probably the first step in creating a decentralised net. That, however, does not make the idea utopian or academic in any way, ‘comrade’. :)
Great post Cosmix!
I agree 100% with you and I believe that as soon as people realize that this kind of action (rdf meta-data and decentralized services) are the key to evolve, then we will truly have the “Semantic Web” that everyone talks about without knowing what truly is!
I will begin my comment with this so much said “I have been visiting your blog for ages but had never wrote a comment before. Congratulations for your work!”. :)
Does it really matter if we call it Web 1.01, Web 2.0 or even Web 2.0 Beta? What you describe is a revolution, that’s for sure, but all these services that keep you cold probably are the first steps towards the path you desire the Web to follow.
To me it sounds like you claim that Windows/Linux/MacOS/etc are not “modern” Operating Systems, because you believe that “modern” OS should do more.
P.S: Hope I was clear and not offensive. I love to read such blog entries and my only intention was/is to discuss. (Bear in mind that, as I previously said, this is my first comment here and I am highly strung. :D)
Hello SebKom,
First of all thanks for your kind words. I appreciate it.
You can play with semantics all you want, but you’d be missing the point. Actually, you may even claim that it doesn’t matter what we call it. And I agree. This post, however, was not about nomenclature. It was about the essence of what people think of this ‘new era’, of how other people spin it, either because they want to make money, or because they are just naive. I claim that all this excitement is unfounded. ‘Web 2.0′ is a confluence of all that’s been happening in the past few years. Everyone wants to be 2.0. No one knows exactly what it is. My post was meant to demonstrate some paradoxes in the ‘user-generated’ perspective and more specifically how people get duped into believing that ‘Web 2.0′ is heralding a new era, that it is significantly different from ‘Web 1.0′ whereas it isn’t. In fact, many of those services that claim to be 2.0 services are more centralised, more backwards in a way, than many of the Web 1.0 era; and that’s because higher connectivity (nothing to do with Web 2.0) makes Web Applications and Services more appealing for many. Sure, today’s web applications run on faster machines, they are built using newer versions or Java, PHP, RoR, ASP or whathaveyou. They have nicer graphics, include video or audio features. But, in essence they are nothing but bells and whistles. Most of the problems/features of Web 1.0 remain unsolved. And the problem here is that all those things have nothing to do with what people are talking about. Many are not even ‘first steps’ towards it. On the contrary, some of them are — arguably — steps away from it. That’s my concern, and that’s my post about. If you need a more concrete example, take blogs (a step towards user-centred, decentralised content) and Flickr. They are not two sides of the same coin. They are vastly different.
If I cared any more than I do, and if it generated the same kind of buzz, noise and reality distortion that ‘Web 2.0′ has been generating for some years now, I’d probably write about new OS releases that claimed to be ‘so much better’ where in reality they’d be nothing but bugfixes with shiny new graphics.
P.S.: Your comment was not offensive at all. You didn’t really get the point of the post, though :)