Web 2.0 Self-Experiment: "
I shopped for everything except food on eBay. When working with foreign-language documents, I used translations from Babel Fish. (This worked only so well. After a Babel Fish round-trip through Italian, the preceding sentence reads, 'That one has only worked therefore well.') Why use up space storing files on my own hard drive when, thanks to certain free utilities, I can store them on Gmail's servers? I saved, sorted, and browsed photos I uploaded to Flickr. I used Skype for my phone calls, decided on books using Amazon's recommendations rather than 'expert' reviews, killed time with videos at YouTube, and listened to music through customizable sites like Pandora and Musicmatch. I kept my schedule on Google Calendar, my to-do list on Voo2do, and my outlines on iOutliner. I voyeured my neighborhood's home values via Zillow. I even used an online service for each stage of the production of this article, culminating in my typing right now in Writely rather than Word. (Being only so confident that Writely wouldn't somehow lose my work -- or as Babel Fish might put it, 'only confident therefore' -- I backed it up into Gmail files.
Interesting article, Tim O'Reilly's response is here"
(Via Valentin Zacharias (Student).)
Tim O'Reilly's response provides the following hierarchy for Web 2.0 based on The what he calls: "Web 2.0-ness":
level 3: The application could ONLY exist on the net, and draws its essential power from the network and the connections it makes possible between people or applications. These are applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. EBay, craigslist, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Skype, (and yes, Dodgeball) meet this test. They are fundamentally driven by shared online activity. The web itself has this character, which Google and other search engines have then leveraged. (You can search on the desktop, but without link activity, many of the techniques that make web search work so well are not available to you.) Web crawling is one of the fundamental Web 2.0 activities, and search applications like Adsense for Content also clearly have Web 2.0 at their heart. I had a conversation with Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, the other day, and he summed up his philosophy and strategy as "Don't fight the internet." In the hierarchy of web 2.0 applications, the highest level is to embrace the network, to understand what creates network effects, and then to harness them in everything you do.
Level 2: The application could exist offline, but it is uniquely advantaged by being online. Flickr is a great example. You can have a local photo management application (like iPhoto) but the application gains remarkable power by leveraging an online community. In fact, the shared photo database, the online community, and the artifacts it creates (like the tag database) is central to what distinguishes Flickr from its offline counterparts. And its fuller embrace of the internet (for example, that the default state of uploaded photos is "public") is what distinguishes it from its online predecessors.
Level 1: The application can and does exist successfully offline, but it gains additional features by being online. Writely is a great example. If you want to do collaborative editing, its online component is terrific, but if you want to write alone, as Fallows did, it gives you little benefit (other than availability from computers other than your own.)
Level 0: The application has primarily taken hold online, but it would work just as well offline if you had all the data in a local cache. MapQuest, Yahoo! Local, and Google Maps are all in this category (but mashups like housingmaps.com are at Level 3.) To the extent that online mapping applications harness user contributions, they jump to Level 2.
So, in a sense we have near conclusive confirmation that Web 2.0 is simply about APIs (typically service specific Data Silos or Walled-gardens) with little concern, understanding, or interest in truly open data access across the burgeoning "Web of Databases". Or the Web of "Databases and Programs" that I prefer to describe as "Data Spaces"
Thus, we can truly begin to conclude that Web 3.0 (Data Web) is the addition of Flexible and Open Data Access to Web 2.0; where the Open Data Access is achieved by leveraging Semantic Web deliverables such as the RDF Data Model and the SPARQL Query Language :-)