Web 2.0 and other musings

I can't recall where I was or how I heard of the term Web 2.0 - It wasn't that long ago...within the last 6 months for sure. When I first heard it, I wondered what it could be and headed to the usual haunt for an explanation. It all felt a bit wooley to be honest. I then saw an important reference to the source of the term....that certainly didn't help...The first port of call in my opinion is much better....

I was having a chat on Messenger with my good friend (and previous business partner) Kevin Jones this evening about what Web 2.0 actually is. We both agreed immediately that it is a Web App that behaves as if it were a thick client app...an Ajax app for sure. None of this long page load malarky...highly responsive...just like every google app...just like a thick client app.

What else? I think that Google dumping web services as the programmable interface to their business is a sign. I'm starting to wonder whether web services are going to be important in the long term with Ajax and JSON lurking in the background. I think web services are a master stroke for linking together systems that otherwise couldn't talk to one another - but supposing everything starts to converge on Web 2.0? The industry will never give up on the web as the most important platform - it will only get better...The web already is the one platform.

I also started thinking about ASP.NET AJAX. I have not programmed it yet but it's an add on to ASP.NET. In other words, Web 2.0 as a metaphor for Web apps was not in the minds of the ASP.NET architects at Redmond when they set about designing the replacement technology for ASP. This started me thinking about Ruby On Rails...this is more recent than ASP.NET so maybe this has an architecture designed with Web 2.0 as it's central metaphor? I have no idea yet as I haven't had a chance to look at it, but I will be doing so shortly!

Everything is heading towards being free to the end user on the web. I'm fairly certain I read that in a Paul Graham essay but don't ask me which one!! This feels right to me. I never pay for something on the web if I can find a way to get it for free with a little bit of extra googling. This is important. I think it's a sign and I certainly hadn't been thinking about it until I read that.

That train of thought started me thinking about open source software - PHP, MySQL, Ruby on Rails, Mono..etc...no matter how hard Redmond tries to run away with technology, these guys follow with free software / software tools...I was reading today that Adsense is built with MySQL as it's backend DB.

There are so many sites out there on Apache (free), running PHP (free) connecting to MySQL (free) that it's hard to ignore it. The end user's apparent running costs must be lower - I'm assuming that the software dev team are good and know their stuff. Why wouldn't you use it? Clearly, it scales!

I don't really have any conclusions to draw from these musings but I am getting a very strong sense of which way the wind is blowing.