Sir Tim Berners-Lee punctures Web 2.0 hype

 

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Posted on 31 Aug 2006 at 15:18

Tim Berners-Lee has debunked all the hype surrounding Web 2.0 insisting that what it purports to describe is exactly what he intended the Web to be when he first conceived it.

Web 2.0 is a buzzword for a collection of technologies that, its advocates claim, enable a new, participatory form of the World Wide Web.

But in an interview on an IBM podcast [transcript here] Berners-Lee argues that all it describes is the Web as interaction between people.

'Web 1.0 was all about connecting people,' he said. 'It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.'

He added that 'the idea of the Web as interaction between people is really what the Web is. That was what it was designed to be as a collaborative space where people can interact.'

As far as Berners-Lee is concerned, Web 2.0 means nothing more than using standards that have been developed by and for Web 1.0.

'It means using the document object model, it means for HTML and SVG and so on, it's using HTTP, so it's building stuff using the Web standards, plus Javascript of course,' he said.

As Wikipedia - the collaborative encyclopaedia often cited as an example of Web 2.0 - points out, many of the technologies most closely associated with the idea have been in use for many years.

'Amazon.com, for instance, has allowed users to write reviews and consumer guides since its inception, in a form of self-publishing,' it notes.

'Conversely, when a website proclaims itself "Web 2.0" for the use of some trivial feature such as blogs or gradient boxes, observers may generally consider it more an attempt at self-promotion than an actual endorsement of the ideas behind Web 2.0,' it says. 'It has sometimes been reduced to simply a marketing buzzword, like "synergy", that can mean whatever a salesperson wants it to do, with little connection to most of the good, but unrelated ideas that it is based on. The argument also exists that "Web 2.0" does not represent a new version of World Wide Web at all, but merely continues to use "Web 1.0" technologies and concepts.'

Author: Simon Aughton