I have deliberately postponed writing my own take on the web 2.0 bandwagon as I figured I’d let the dust settle so I’d make an actual opinion on the whole phenomenon. Here’s the short version:

• The current web sucks
• Web 1.0 was about money, web 2.0 is going to be about money AND data
• Web 2.0 is going to be the .com bubble all over again
• In the end, very few people who invested in web 2.0 are going to get financial gain; only users will win
• Open-source is not going to save the world
• Web 2.0 is not about Flash
• Web 2.0 is about obvious things, web 3.0 is about complicated things

The current web sucks

This is admittedly a controversial statement, and was countered numerous times in long and hilarious posts by the man Jesse. However, consider this:

Most popular sites around these days use technology widely available 10 years ago. Consider for example Google, whose homepage features only a search field and an image. If you look at the search results, you will also notice that nothing in there could not have been accomplished in the early nineties; the page could probably validate as HTML 3.2 after cleanup. Now I’m not saying that’s a good or a bad thing, I’m just saying that web 1.0 (which for the purpose of this article officially ended Valentine’s Day, 2005) has always used technology which is way behind what current browsers and a few major plugins (cough) are able to do.

Now most will agree that with HTML 3.2 you were able to build the kinds of apps that you could easily have created about 20 years ago in Q-Basic, save for images in JPEG format. Have we really evolved with the web? The question begs asking.

Now if we look at something like Google Maps, now we see a true leap forward. You see, Google Maps relies on XMLHttpRequest, which has been around since the launch of IE5, which was released in September 1998. Now we’re only a mere 7 and a half years behind technologically. The idea of tile-based maps reminds me of… Sid Meier’s Civilization, released in 1991.

My point behind this short introduction is that we are currently stuck in time with regards to web apps. Web applications have nowhere near the level of responsiveness and UI innovativeness that have been common in offline apps for a good ten years. Forms-based post-back interaction is dumb, and it’s time we start exploring other stuff. Therefore Web 2.0 is only a welcome thing.

Why have we been stuck in a UI rut? Why have we only just started realizing that maybe the way we are currently building web apps is dumb? I think that the reason is that after the dot-com boom everyone started to be very conservative as to what a web app should be. This conservatism was completely misplaced of course. The reason is that when lots of people have lost money they tend to be scared of losing more, and therefore they stick to ‘proven’ techniques. Meanwhile this conservative-thinking has creeped in and become normalized to the level where anything that diverges slightly from the norm is taken to mean ‘this is web 2.0′.

Allow me to reiterate: UI construction these days is dumb. Do you realize that a year ago all we had is MapQuest? Do you remember how completely stupid Mapquest’s interface seemed after seeing Google Maps? Well what O’Reilly and the bandwagon are saying is that pretty soon you’ll think that about most of the web, and that I have to agree.

If there is any criticism to Web 2.0 regarding this update in UI, it is in fact that it is not going far enough. Money and time issues have turned a lot of web designers into mindless drones, so instead of copying UI from the late 80’s, web 2.0 is going to copy UIs from the early 90’s. Jakob Nielson and the rest of the usability clique have convinced us that if it’s innovative, it’s crap. Look at the UI components list in Flash 8; those are all pretty standard controls for operating system. It seems these controls have been around forever. There has to be something else then ComboBoxes and DataGrids to present data.

If all of this sounds like speculation, remember that just a few years ago there was no such things as ‘tabbed browsing’. In all of the discussions on single document interface vs. multiple document interface no one seemed to have the brilliant idea to bring the debate to an end by bridging the two and creating tabs. I mean, come on, when you think about it, it’s pretty obvious, yet it took ten years for all of the IT people in the entire freakin’ world to come up with that idea.

As another example, treemaps are 2d or 3d representations of hierarchical data that behave much better than 1 dimensional trees. These can be useful for visually mapping a hard drive or folder structure, like here and here. Have we seen any of this on the web yet? Didn’t think so.

Web 1.0 was about money, web 2.0 is going to be about money AND data

Dot-com crashed because people with no business plan or experience attempted to create money online by copying word for word business plans for non-virtual stores, and then realizing it just didn’t work that way. What did succeed in the eCommerce realm is whatever had an actual advantage over brick and mortar stores. We readily identify a few winners in the last battle for the web:

• Auction and niche sites, which offered stuff not readily available off the web (eBay).
• Large market sites which offered reproducible products like CDs and books but with a selection far greater than traditional sites (Amazon).
• Porn sites which benefited from anonymous, instantaneous access to material which most disdained having to bring home from video and specialty stores. This last one has been by far the most successful the web has seen.

What seems odd in the previous three is that they are products which were available before the web but now with a small but very convenient twist. In the end, the successful commercial web has just imitated the real world, and won on technicalities.

Now that the dot com bubble has settled, people are still looking at making money off of it, and have asked the question: what is the web really good for. As it turns out, the web is a fantastic place to share data. So while web 1.0 was about making money from money (as in the real world), web 2.0 will be about making money from data. Wikis, tagging, RSS, XML, Web services, whatever it is; it’s all about classifying and syndicating other data. It’s also about stopping the constant reinventing of the wheel: why create your own photo gallery when you can have a damn good one for free using Flick?

Web 2.0 is going to be the .com bubble all over again

Just like web 1.0 was for most involved a complete financial failure, web 2.0 is also going to be a financial failure. The reason is simple: those involved in the decision making are completely clueless about what makes or breaks an app. To actually make any money in web 2.0 would require a complete overhaul of decision structures not spiritually unlike anarcho-syndicalism.

Warren Buffet, the second richest man in the world, has often stated that he did not invest in online ventures because he didn’t understand them. That, my friends, is pure genius.

In the end, very few people who invested in web 2.0 are going to gain financially; only users will win

Web 2.0 is going to make a lot of money move around. It will be an awesome time for web developers to stuff their pockets. Will investors see a good ROI? Most likely not. The reason is that everyone is jumping on the bandwagon. Only the very few that get in the door first will make any significant money; those that lag behind will only be copying others and will get in the same position they were before the start of the whole phenomenon. Those who refuse to change in the end will most likely die or suffer heavy losses.

Users will win a lot though. They’ll get much better user interfaces and tons of free services. I can’t wait to see what people will come up with in the next few years while they scramble to make money on the ‘next big thing’.

Open-source is not going to save the world

A lot of people have put links between web 2.0’s supposed radical decentralization of data and the open-source movement. Some even believe that web 2.0 is finally the chance for open-source to shine, with Ruby on Rails and PHP and Linux becoming household names.

As I’ve stated before, the world has much bigger problems than evil commercial software. If you think open-source software will save the world, you must be smoking crack, and lots of it. Also I think open-source’s place in the general software landscape will stay just about the same after the second bubble bursts. Why? Because the bottleneck in adoption is education; it doesn’t have anything to do with web n.0 at all. Why are there so many .NET developers? Because that’s what they teach in schools. Period.

Web 2.0 is not about Flash

A lot of other people have stated that web 2.0 is finally going to be the time for Flash to shine as a ‘platform’ for ‘rich internet applications’. I’m sorry, but these people are, yet again, dead wrong. Flash is coming full circle: at first it was an animation tool, then it became a site-creation tool, then it became a lightweight scripting tool, and now it becomes a platform for creating ‘rich internet application’. AS3 will come with a free compiler and it will be ‘as fast as Java’. It will also be very close syntactically to Java. The big question for most newcomers will then be: why don’t I just use Java in the first place.

Now before everyone gets upset, I’d just like to remind everyone that I am a Flash developer, I don’t create Java apps, and I likely never will. I know why I’m using Flash, but the question is, why would a new developer choose Flash? Why are they choosing AJAX or whatever the hell you want to call it instead? Why are they picking Java and soon Sparkle and whatever other technology is going to be available in the next few years?

The answer is that Flash has very unique capabilities; it can combine vector animation, sound, video, scripting, data, requires only a small plugin and runs in a browser. Do you think those are the required ingredients to make it a mainstream tool? Nope. Unique strengths means a niche market. Flash is becoming better, but everything else is getting better too. Flash will keep its market share, it may grow a little, but a million developers? You must be dreaming.

Are you going to cry? Don’t! I am sure many of you are aware that most Flash developers make more than say .NET and Java heads. I say, it better stay a niche market, or we’ll all have to work a lot more to make the same money.

I will also be disappointing a few when I say that Flash, one day, will die. It’s true. There is nothing you can do about it. Platforms come and go. They do their job for a little while, and then something better comes along. Stay tuned for Sparkle and the ‘next big thing’, cause you won’t be doing Flash forever, the same way that you didn’t do Director forever.

Web 2.0 is about obvious things, web 3.0 is about complicated things

Finally, let me state that Web 2.0 is going to be accessible to most ‘everyday’ developers in that it will deal with obvious things. Making better interfaces is not about laying out complicated math formulas; it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how to make a better interface. In fact what we need is exactly the opposite; phasing out of it, and making things simpler and more useful by cleaning everything that we have in mind about user interfaces and starting from scratch. We need a blank slate.

The things you currently see in web 2.0-dom these days, when you think about them, their premises, they’re all deceptively simple. Think about gmail, google maps, yubnub, flickr: they didn’t invent a new concept. Webmail, maps, command lines, photo galleries, they’re all old ideas. They’ve been around forever. Well people looked at them and figured they needed an overhaul. There’s a team of guys and gals that sat at a table and asked “why the hell isn’t this working, and what should we do to make it work”. And the reasons why it wasn’t working were dead obvious. But we’re habit forming creatures, as soon as we’re used to something, it seems that anything else is unnatural. If it’s been that way for a month, it might as well have been that way since the dawn of time, since we tend to forget really quick that we even made arbitrary decisions in the first place.

A recent client of mine had brilliant ideas about a top-secret project every other day. He would expose these ideas to me through the phone while laughing and saying “C’est niaiseux” at the very end of it. “C’est niaiseux” means roughly “it’s so stupid”. Now most of these ideas were actually damn near genius, but they all had a very simple premise. At first I thought it was a bluff when he said that it was pretty stupid to implement, so that I would bring my prices down. In fact, most of his ideas were completely trivial to implement.

The thing is, web 1.0 was stuck in a rut. It wasn’t going anywhere, it was sitting on its ass watching tv all day. Web 2.0 is going to change the obvious things that need to be changed. Not until Web 3.0 (or the next bubble, whatever you call it) are we actually going to get to the hard problems. Why? Because they’re still money to be made solving the obvious problems.

Remember, c’est niaiseux.