Web 2.0: nice start
March 12th, 2007 by Hugh KennedyAccording to a recent piece in The Economist, Tim Berners-Lee, the real founder of the Internet, considers Web 2.0 to be a nice name for some Web publishing tools, but on the whole a lot of what he tried to build into the Web 16 years ago, in 1991. To quote the nicest guy on the net, “The web was designed so every user could be a contributor. That sort of participation was the whole idea and was there from the start.” So now that we’ve reached adolescence together, what’s next?
Where Berners-Lee sees the real excitement these days is mobile computing: bringing a standard, UI-friendly version of the Web over phones and therein serving the next billion users in places like Asia (11% Web access) and Africa (4% Web access). The time may be ripe, though as I write this I sit in the former home of Adesemi, a failed company set on bringing mobile access to Africa, and still hold a ripe memory of trying to access Verizon’s Web site on my mobile yesterday when it refused to acknowledge the time change. Navigating around on a Web site not optimized for the small screen is like trying to read the name of an ocean liner as it passes ten feet in front of you. Perhaps the rise of the semantic Web, Berners-Lee’s other big quest, will help all of our chipsets pull the right information and make sense of it, even pull connections from across genomic databases that are today siloed from each other. “Vague,” to quote his boss’s marginalia on the proposal at CERN that later became the Web, “but exciting.”