The current state of the Web
In a post named Web 2.0 Elevator Pitch Richard MacManus today says that “The ‘What is Web 2.0?’ meme is everywhere and everyone seems to have a different interpretation”.
That’s absolutely true but why do everyone have a different interpretation? Probably because the so-called Web 2.0 actually is a mixup or different things and thus can be seen from many different points of view. Nobody will tell you what exactly is Web 2.0 maybe because there’s nothing like a 2.0 version of the Web out there. There are trends and technologies, ways to create data and communicate that are rapidly changing the way people live their online experience. There’s a current status of the Web I’ll try to analyze here. It’s made up of so many parts that a comprehensive and short definition is impossible. Anyway I’m convinced that all the pieces and perspectives that today make the Web a web of services, or a web as a platform are intimately interrelated, even if they range from highly technical arguments to social behaviours.
I will try to give my interpretation following the common pattern of a bottom-up stack of layers, each one having the preceding one as its foundation and influencing the next higher.
At the lowest level there’s the most technical stuff. What matters for today’s Web is the presence, at this level, of protocols (HTTP), languages (XML and XML-based ones) and APIs that make data universally and easily readable by any application disregarding of the differences in operating systems, development platforms and languages. This is what I call movable data. This level is the realm of true innovators, people who, in the nineties, opened the door to universal data access (XML), saw the importance of the separating data from presentation (think RSS) and of metadata (data describing data) and self-explanatory data (think RDF). Many formats exist today at this level: they describle little pieces of data that represent real world objects, from a news item to a recipe, from a classified to a calendar event, and are often referred to as microcontent. At the same level there are APIs that allow any application to perform data creation, retrieval, update and deletion operations on online data repositories: while some formats, like RSS, only require (and allow) one retrieve operation without parameters, others offer complete interaction via a documented API (Flickr being an example of this).
On top of this layer where everything is XML flowing around in the pipelines of the HTTP protocol, there’s a higher layer where applications use all this ubiquitous data as the ingredient of a content remix that’s one of the key component of the modern Web culture: news aggregators, allowing the syndication of different news sources into a custom-made newspaper are the first and most used example movable data remixers. Other examples range from the desktop blogging tools that implement the MetaWeblog and other APIs to store contents into weblogs to the Javascript scripts that allow you to show your latest five Flickr photos on your homepage. In the arguably next future, microcontent formats will see a number of applications creating, retrieving and dispatching events among shared calendars; sending you a warning message on your Jabber client (that, again, uses an XML-based protocol called XMPP) when a new classified matching your criteria has appeared, obviously aggregating classifieds from different sources using the same standard format; even finding your daily recipe online depending on your taste and calories count. This is the level where applications talk each other and where most of the innovation should be created during the next years, fantasy is the only limit here. This is also the level at which the Web stops being a communication media and, as an network of open data sources and methods of fruition, becomes a platform.
The third layer is the individual user layer, strongly influenced by the content remix allowed buy the underlying technology. To the non-geek web user, all that technology means being able to follow a hundred news sources all from a single page, get notified by a little application sitting in his menubar when he receives an email on a webmail service like gmail, upload a bunch of photos to a web sharing service via a single drag and drop onto one of the Flickr clients available or even manage a hundres online eBay auctions in a matter of a few clicks. The user does what he could do anyway, only in a faster and more exciting way.
It’s on top of all this, at the community level, that all this has the strongest impact. Users using technologies and applications of the lower layers interact by exchanging information. They build social networks by sharing their thoughts online thanks to the automatic content routing and delivery allowed by the applications of movable data. They connect with people with similar interests and get notified when somebody enters their neighbourhood. They tag others’ content and build topic-based network. They set up connections with people they’d never meet otherwise and build reputations that exit the realm of the technology and enter the social environment.
The user as a component of a social environment is the center of the human side of the Web (I totally agree with Susan Mernit here) just like movable data is the cornerstone of the technical side: the user doesn’t see the Web as a bunch of websites anymore, but as a space where he/she manages information, where services interoperate under his control, where he/she can opt-out any time because protocols and formats follow standards. He/she creates, remixes, connects and interacts. And this way contributes and, not a passive reader anymore, becomes part of the Web itself.
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