Friday, July 01, 2005

Cringley on Web Two Point Oh

Accessories Make the Nerd "...the gray web is filled with data that we can search, perhaps, but can't understand. Imagine using an English-language search engine to search a Persian-language web site. The way out of this, to a new dawn where visible, invisible, and gray data alike are available to us, is through Web 2.0 (sometimes called or confused with the so-called "semantic web"), where we will use metadata (primarily XML) to advertise our needs and disposals to the world.

This is a huge leap for anything as established as the Web, to say that we are going to add an overlay of metadata so that you can not only share with the world a picture of your car, but also set terms under which you'd sell that car."

"There are several problems with this concept, not the least of which is the Tower of Babel effect in which every metadata tagger can use his or her own tagging system, none of which are necessarily readable by the others. Joe sees no problem in that because computers are really good at lifting and carrying, and mapping a thousand tag formats to each other isn't all that much harder than mapping a few. But I see people as being inherently lazy, and Yahoo and Google and all the other big web companies as being inherently greedy and unwilling to give up their businesses so easily."

"Here is what Web 2.0 WILL be, in my view: a new way of structuring Internet businesses around published APIs, Application Programming Interfaces. New companies will spring up that simply glue web-based APIs together...Web 2.0 will be staffed by two different kinds of entrepreneurs -- those who provide staunch web services exposed through APIs (Amazon, eBay, Google, and a bunch more), and those who glue those services together and make some sort of useful abstraction service."

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