Do Believe the Web 2.0 Hype

I think it was Sir Isaac Newton who first observed that “every hype surge has an equal and opposite antihype backlash.” Or maybe it was Gartner Group. I’ve made the observation many times that tech journalists like to talk up every new technology to the moon (creating a fertile source of stories), then bash it into a pulp when it doesn’t achieve its supposed potential in a ridiculously unrealistic timeframe (creating another, potentially richer source of stories).

It seems that Web 2.0 has now fallen firmly into Gartner’s so-called Trough of Disillusionment. My friend Radovan Janecek points to a slew of rants by technology insiders sick of seeing the same tired buzzwords bandied about with little regard for substance.

The irony is that the antihypers are often as wrong as the original hype hounds. As far as I’m concerned, the term Web 2.0 is serving a useful purpose by pointing to an undenial sea change in the way web architectures are structured. It’s hard to come up with a concise definition since there’s more than one major shift occurring. But we should be wary of writing Web 2.0 off as vacuous before it has a realistic chance of achieving its potential, particularly since this is likely to take several years.

One of the abovementioned shifts is increasing exploitation of “the wisdom of crowds”, pioneered in Google’s PageRank algorithm and exemplified by del.icio.us. As significant is the movement of application logic from the server to the client, and the parallel growth in XML, as opposed to HTML, data streams. This is part of the appeal of the horribly overhyped AJAX, but the same premise underlies Firefox’s extension mechanism. A VC friend of mine asked me the other day if we weren’t swimming against the tide by promoting client-side architectures at a time when everything is moving onto the server, but I think that in reality the opposite is the case. Perhaps this is due to a misconception that AJAX apps actually run on the server.

Web 2.0 may be a messy term, and it’s undeniably over- (and frequently mis-) used. But it’s still a useful way of encapsulating a real and important trend.

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4 Comments »

1. While AJAX apps run on the client, the key differentiator is that their download and installation are seemless for the user. By merely using a webpage the AJAX bits are downloaded.

   Firefox plug-ins, on the other hand limit your market to a single browser (with a lesser installed base) and to people who are willing to install software in a paranoid world with malware and corporate network watchdogs who will invisibly wipe software off of client machines.

   Don’t get me wrong, what Matt and his crew are doing is very cool, and it really needs client-side software installed because of its p2p roots. But don’t be to quick to imply that a Firefox extension and AJAX are essentially the same or that the business dynamics are the same.

   So when is your extension coming out anyway…I want it!

   Comment by Mike — 10/24/2005 @ 7:07 pm

2. Thanks for your comments, Mike. I didn’t mean to imply that AJAX and FF extensions are the same thing, merely that they are both indicative of a migration of code back from the server onto the client and that this is a primary characteristic of Web 2.0.

   AJAX has the advantage of simplicity (from the user’s perspective) and ubiquity, as you say. On the other hand, AJAX apps have limited access to local resources (such as data storage or low-level networking), they can’t rival the native machine code performance of C++, and it’s hard to structure the code in a way that is modular and maintainable.

   So I believe there is room for both AJAX for (simpler apps) and extensions (for more complex or demanding apps like AllPeers).

   AllPeers 2.0 will be available Real Soon Now.

   Comment by Matt — 10/25/2005 @ 1:33 pm

3. Describing The Web 2.0 Information Ecosystem

   It’s refereshing to see people like Stowe Boyd take a serious look at where Web 2.0 is heading these days with an relatively open mind, though there are still plenty (Chris Pirillo) of others (Matthew Gertner) keeping it constructive or keeping it in

   Trackback by web2.wsj2.com — 10/26/2005 @ 1:18 am

4. Canter on Web 2.0

   Matt Gertner:… we should be wary of writing Web 2.0 off as vacuous before it has a realistic chance of achieving its potential, particularly since this is likely to take several years. … Web 2.0 may be a messy term,

   Trackback by Preoccupations — 11/1/2005 @ 1:44 pm

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