Lots of cool things have been happening in the web-app world as of late, and there are some very exciting bits of it that I think are going to contribute to the next bit of a jump in software usefulness. In my opinion, many of these bits have to do with them being inherently networked applications, using a common model and delivery mechanism. The other cool bits arise from the interesting things that happen when lots of people contribute in different ways (the human networking effect).

Software that talks to other software (the technical network effect) The accessibility and remixability of these new apps yields some astounding results... for example, Google Maps matched up with Craigslist real estate ads (oh MAN, if I could have had that when I was looking for houses), Google News, Greasemonkey scripts that tell you if the book you're looking at on Amazon is available at your local library. Though lots of this is now being done with simple, well-defined web APIs, I've also seen some impressive stuff done with just screen-scraping of HTML. Another really great example is some of the stuff being done at Yub Nub, which is in a lot of ways the internet command line that I had been dreaming of a few years back.

Software that learns from its users (the human network effect) - More and more web applications are taking advantage of thousands of brains; Amazon's recommendations and Google's page-ranking come immediately to mind, but there's also del.icio.us, flickr, and any number of other apps that are doing really interesting things just by noticing what people do and like; sort of like taking advantage of the footpaths that get worn in the grass by lots of people walking from one destination to another.

It was only a matter of time before this convergence of things got a name, and the name kinda scares me: "Web 2.0" The number of ways that this term is going to be misused just makes my skin crawl. It's also doomed to become a cliche and known mostly by a superficial feature: the use of lots of DHTML.

However... it does seem that there are lots of folks out there who do "get it". I stumbled on an article at The Social Software Weblog called Approaching a definition of Web 2.0 that that crystallized a lot of the thinking I've been doing about applications for that past couple of years.

And, since I'm a sucker for visualization, here's a nice diagram from the aforementioned article that shows the interaction of some of the features I've mentioned above. Hurrah for diagrams!


posted on 10/01/2005 12:58:00 AM