Let's call it Web 1.5 and Shake on it · 674 words posted 08/10/2005 09:52 AM

Here’s a tip that Web 2.0 isn’t all it’s cracked up to be: Salon breathlessly profiled 37signals—and spent as much time talking about Ruby on Rails and Ajax as it did discussing how Web 2.0 can actually help end users.

Never forget that Salon announced its IPO in 1999 without bothering with such trifles as, say, how they planned to make any money. To be fair, this was 1999 and everybody was behaving stupidly with money. But that’s just the point: Salon drinks the Koolaid. It is a follower of trendlets, not a maker of them.

Right on cue, Web 2.0 had a hiccup. As Airbag notes:

As I write this in the last twenty-four hours the much hyped Web 2.0 hasn’t exactly lived up to it’s AJAX Ruby-Railed star power like I would like it too, like I would think it should. These applications that I use to do business have been kaput — completely unreachable for one reason or another.

Which is to say, I can’t drag and drop my to-do lists if I can’t access my to-do lists. Web 2.0 won’t live up to the hype until it supports occasionally-connected clients. Here’s a workflow to dream about:

  1. Make updates to milestones in Basecamp.
  2. Store the information locally in case I’m not close to a WiFi access point, or if the Basecamp server is on the fritz.
  3. My client and Basecamp have a chat whenever I’m next connected and my updates are made automagically.

Before we truly reach Web 2.0, let’s posit three requirements:

OK, I cheated. Those bullet points, in slightly different language, come straight from a Macromedia marketing page for Central, its early attempt at supporting Web 2.0. (Curiously, when Central was released in 2003, the phrase du jour was “Internet 2.0”). In hindsight, it’s easy to see that Central was ahead of its time. Still, its adoption never took off the way Macromedia hoped. Why did Central fail? I’d suggest two reasons:

First, Macromedia wrongly assumed the people want to accomplish tasks on their desktops instead of in a browser. The success of Basecamp shows that people don’t care where they work, as long as they can get the job done. If I have a choice between opening my browser—almost any modern browser on almost any modern computer—or installing an application such as Central, I’ll take the browser almost every time.

Second, Central never achieved the mindshare that AJAX/Rails now has, and the applications suffered for it. In short, developers failed to imagine what was possible with Web 2.0 applications. Look at the prototypical Central app: Central Developer Chat. What’s the point? What could it possibly do that iChat, or Fire, or any number of dedicated chat clients can’t do significantly better? Is chat even Web 2.0?

Finally, let’s add another bullet to my list of Web 2.0 requirements:

This requirement highlights why desktop installations will never achieve Web 2.0 status: users don’t want to be bound to a single vendor, single machine access point before retrieving data. Flash 8, with its near-universal installation base and new support for local file access, might sidestep that requirement because people can still use the browser of their choice.

Where does that leave us? On one side, with a vendor who released a product that was clearly ahead of its time (even if I didn’t understand why at the time) but demanded desktop lock-in. On the other side, a clever set of open APIs with mindshare to burn but no easy and robust way to support occasional connectivity.

Once again, it’s an exciting time to be a web developer, but boosterism won’t get us to the promised land. When we have widespread, vendor neutral support for occasional connections, then and only then we’ll have Web 2.0. Until then, let’s call it Web 1.5 and shake on it.

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