O'Reilly has milked the Web 2.0 cow for
crateloads of milk, thus far. There may, in fact, be some unknown
number gulps still left in the animal, but by god, I won't be
drinking any.
I think it's high time to put the Web 2.0 moniker to
death. It's four years old. That's one hell of a lengthy iteration
cycle. Can't we at least get a point release? But then O'Reilly would
have to buy Web 2.1 and 2.2 and 2.3 andd 2.4rc5.
The milking continued last week at Web
2.0 Expo in San Francisco, and to the expo's credit, there were some
great talks by folks like Jeremiah Grossman, Brian Aker and Mr.
O'Reilly himself. Please pause for a moment, as I again reinforce in
my own mind the fact that Tim O'Reilly is of no relation to Basil
Fawlty's bungling and oft-absent contractor.
Perhaps that's why there was so much
focus placed on what Sun officially named Web 3.0 back in 2006: At
Web 2.0, everyone was talking about sensors. Cameras, temperature,
accelerometers, motion, and all of them hooked into the Web via
what-have-you.
Attendance was way, way down from last
year. Some of the companies on the show floor have been the victims
of vicious rumors in the startup chatter box; most of the rumors
focused on potentially closing doors.
And yet, everyone and their mother had
a story here. The expo hall was overflowing with products and
companies advertising everything from content management systems, to
cloud computing platforms, to their data APIs. That's right, some
folks are there just to petition users to build with their APIs. What
a changed world we live in.
But I contend that Web 2.0 is over.
It's time to move on to Web 2.1, then on to 3.0 and all those spying
gadgets peering down from above. Version 2.1 will probably look the
way Google Chrome expects: individual apps are no-longer desktop
bound, and we all live in something like Google Docs and Gmail.
That's probably why another big theme
at Web 2.0 Expo was desktop-like, or desktop-based Web-enabled
applications. Compelling UI, better responsiveness, etc. There were a
lot of talks on optimizing Web applications. Unfortunately, a lot of
talks were also empty. That low attendance was profoundly obvious.