From AlperWiki

[edit] Definition

Web 2.0 is pretty murky ground. I will have to combine existing statements to come up with a definition of my own.

Paul Graham comes up with a nice tripartite definition which somewhat reflects the values I was talking about earlier (Paul Graham - Web 2.0).

• Ajax
• Democracy (amateurization of everything, popularity aggregation, everybody can create)
• Don't maltreat users (be nice, do not be evil, no walled gardens)

Web 2.0 means using the web the way it's meant to be used.

Of course this then begs the question: In what way is it meant to be used with regards to communities and personal relationships? Alper 15:38, 21 Nov 2005 (CET)

What is Web 2.0 is Tim O'Reilly's positive and in-depth take on the topic

[edit] Problems

There are some problems with Web 2.0 technologies. Interesting questions that arise are:

• Do the technologies inherent in Web 2.0 influence online community structures in a new and profound way?

The idea of the Daily Me suggests that people will stay in their niches with regards to information filtering and media consumption. The comfort zone of what is familiar and is guaranteed to pique albeit briefly interest combined with the lack of enough attention to see everything spells doom for any kind of exposure to new stimuli, strang and unusual media and phenomena.

The concept of media as a mass enterprise is being pushed backward in favor of User Generated Content. This makes the creation and the consumption of media an inherently social thing. But because of the attention deficit and the filtering in the Daily Me the social exposure that people experience may also be severely limited and prefiltered based on personal bias. This way the possibilities and inherent limitations of technology shape who interacts with whom and in what way. (Not to say that this is not happening already with severe balkanization and incrowd behaviour in forums starting from Usenet up until extremely islamitic fora right now).

• Is it possible to present a coherent and user friendly experience in a world where it is increasingly the norm to relinquish control?

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[edit] Values

Value based design as an essential prerequisite for next generation (Web 2.0) technologies.

There are some prerequisites for successful technologies:

• Simpleness
• Elegance
• Free as in beer
• Open as in access
• Open as in source
• Open as in data

Openness as in no 'walled gardens'.

(source the Dick Hardt presentation and the failure of Microsoft Passport adoption in the marketplace)

these are more important than the technological merit of the respective technology, though this is also not to be ignored

see also C#/Mono vs. Java

Value Based Web I have been looking into the discipline of value based design for a bit and I am thinking more and more that there are a core set of values at work in software of which we are recently beginning to see the effects.

Value based design is a field of study which monitors design of technology to make sure the effects do not get out of control. The design of new technologies should be guided by a set of design principles which should ensure (or at least make a lot more probable) that the resulting new technology is fair and safe in the widest sense of meaning possible.

Possible values which can be applied to the design process are non-discrimination, openness and assurance of privacy. Not thinking about these issues during design (or deliberately neglecting them) could lead to systems whose outcome was not as thought. This wrong outcome can manifest it so that the system is unusable, or it negatively impacts some or all of its users or simply that the system does not receive the adoption that was envisioned from the onset.

The software engineering process is notorious for its often and large failures throughout most of its commercial existence. It has proven difficult to estimate to a reasonable degree of accuracy the time and money necessary to complete a certain project. And even when complete the functionality and form offered by the software products usually were completely different from the expectations of the customers and from the needs of the final end users.

This is not so bad anymore as it used to be. This is partly to blame on the maturing of the software industry and of software engineering as a science. Agile programming methodologies are gaining in adoption, and rapid iterations with the customer usually provide alignment with customer desires. This blame can be attributed further on the fact that a lot of software today is web based. Web based software has a couple of important properties. Its development is usually done in an agile fashion. It has no issues of distribution whatsoever and it has a potential audience of everybody. These provide some restrictions and guides for the development of a software product but also make the potential impact tremendous.

Define succes: In good IT projects online we have seen that

success and failure, adoption, user friendliness etc. in the software industry

for a technology on the web to succeed widely there are some prerequisites it has to be free it has to be open

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