Well, the Web 2.0 group seems to develop Web 2.0 not so fast. People
keep talking about tools, and rewrites theories. So, since I have
nothing new to show, I decided to talk about those Google Pages.
Sometimes
my students say that "Google Cola" will be the next Google Product.
It's just a joke, but not far from true – Google is working in lots of
different areas. But Google Pages is close to what Google seems to
think as a good tool, and close to Google's business. And pretty simple
to use. I decided to use it because it has (surprisingly) a better
photo support than Flickr. I created my own home page. Go there and take a look…
(First of all, sorry for the delay. People were too worried about Google’s new stuff (Writely and Calendar), and during some days I can’t read much about Web 2.0)
Dion Hinchcliffe, whose blog I read often, published in his last post some Web 2.0 events reports. And those reports make me wonder about how seldom we heard about Web 2.0 events. It looks like something important – even for those who don’t believe that Web 2.0 should be a standard. In fact, too much important to have so little marketing. My boss never heard about it. No one at my company ever heard about it. Rarely people at my University heard about it – I recently wrote an e-mail to an interfaces teacher, asking him to chat about Web 2.0, and got no answer. I never saw a single talk about Web 2.0 in any Free Software-related event. This sounds no good for me.
But I’d not be able to answer the three-letter-question: “Why?”. Would you?
Helder just published about a “Wiki 2.0″. WetPaint is a full of Web 2.0 techniques wiki, and looks like interesting. I particularly don’t think that some wikis (like MediaWiki) need to have much improve, but WetPaint have some improvements, like talk pages structured as weblog comments.
I was willing to try WetPaint, when I stared with a page saying: “Go away, because your Firefox version is not welcome here”. Well, I, as root user of my machine, am solving it by upgrading my Firefox. But I, as a developer, don’t want that my client be unable to use my service, just because she has an older version of her browser.
Web stardards was, on my mind, an old issue in web development. On my mind, only old-fashioned web pages do not open in any browser. This showed that I’m probably wrong, and that web standards should be subject of Web 2.0 discussions also.
One of my students brought to me yesterdey, during the Graph class, the information of a brazilian weblog who said that Web 2.0 means nothing. I started to read it and, well, that post means nothing. So I went following the links (many of them in English, if you want to follow), and found there are some people really thinking that Web 2.0 is a piece of crap.
This criticism is probably a natural reaction to all buzzwords that gravitate around the Web 2.0 concept. But it lacks in a point. Web 2.0 means what we want it to mean. If we’re worried about giving names to stuff, then they’re right. But if we’re worried about things that should rule the future IT market, then we got a point, and studying Web 2.0 is not a complete waste of time.
For me, I pretend to keep Web 2.0 alive.
When I started to speak about all tis Web 2.0 stuff, some programmers asked me about development-related tutorials. There’s a very simple one, made by Mozilla Foundation, in several languages. Definitely, people should try it.
