“Understanding the true spirit of the new web”

There has been a lot of talk about web 2.0 and online services which fall under this category. I have become an ardent user of some of these services myself and have gained a lot of value from them. Hence, I thought it would be a good idea to explore the philosophy of the new web.

Web 2.0 for me is not so much a change in the web, but more a realization of the goal of “The network is now your computer” philosophy. This means that users are no longer viewers and consumers of services/content, but are actively participating in creating new services and content from customizable Lego-style web based software. They’re gathering and disseminating their own news with blogs and podcasts, creating customized articles and photo feeds from their favorite sites and even annotating them with helpful text tags that others can search.

Paul Graham, co-founder of Viaweb (the first web-based application) wrote an enlightening essay on what differentiates the new web from web 1.0. According to him, the key differentiating elements are:

• AJAX: "Ajax means JavaScript now works, and that in turn means that web-based applications can now be made to work much more like desktop ones.”
• Democracy: This means that given the right kind of system to channel their efforts, a group of amateurs can surpass professionals. Some of famous examples of where democracy has won on the web are:
• Wikipedia vs. Encyclopedia
• Reddit / Digg vs. Traditional Newspapers
• Value your users: In the late 90s most popular sites were loaded with obtrusive branding that made them slow to load and sent the user the message: this is our site, not yours. (There's a physical analog in the Intel and Microsoft stickers that come on some laptops.). Most popular services this time around give great importance to their users. So whether it is del.icio.us, flickr, reddit, or basecamp; for them users always come first and this shows in their products.

However, what got me excited was the fact that if you pay close attention to these elements mentioned in Paul’s essay, you come to realize that Google has been a pioneer in all three components of Web 2.0. "Value your users" is a subset of "Don't be evil,” motto that Google swears by. Google’s PageRank technique relies on the millions of individuals posting websites to determine which other sites offer content of value instead of relying on a group of editors or solely on the frequency with which certain terms appear and of course Google set off the whole Ajax boom with Google Maps.

Google is one of the few internet firms that not only survived the internet bubble burst but was really unaffected by it. So does this mean that the new web is nothing more than all the good things about the web 1.0 that survived the bubble burst? If this is true, maybe the new resurgence in web-based services (which follow the web 2.0 philosophies) is not just another media buzz. Well I guess only time will tell!!!