Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hey guys, and welcome to tex Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works in my Heart Radio and I love
Speaker 1: all things tech. And today we're going to listen to
Speaker 1: another classic episode. Because I'm still on vacation, I will
Speaker 1: be back very soon, but today we're going to look
Speaker 1: back on what was a real big buzzword or I
Speaker 1: guess buzz phrase back in the day, which was web
Speaker 1: two point oh that was used to describe lots of stuff.
Speaker 1: It was a fairly vague term. So in this episode
Speaker 1: I go into explain what was web two point oh?
Speaker 1: What was the whole concept behind that. I hope you
Speaker 1: enjoy this classic episode what is web two point oh?
Speaker 1: But I think we've had enough time since then to
Speaker 1: really take a look back and explore what the concept
Speaker 1: of web two point was and what if anything is
Speaker 1: taking its place, and does the term mean anything? Was
Speaker 1: it just kind of a placeholder. It's gonna be a
Speaker 1: lot of opinion in this because it's from my own
Speaker 1: personal perspective, but honestly, if you've heard the term web
Speaker 1: two point oh, and you always wondered what that meant.
Speaker 1: That's what I want to cover today. But to start off,
Speaker 1: we need to look at a history of the web itself.
Speaker 1: And I'm sure you all know that the Web and
Speaker 1: the Internet are two different things, but just in case,
Speaker 1: let's lay down that groundwork. Now, the Internet refers to
Speaker 1: the network of networks, this gigantic network of computer networks
Speaker 1: that are all interconnected together. There's a series of connections
Speaker 1: that allows computers to communicate with one another. So this
Speaker 1: is an enormous system that allows all kinds of different
Speaker 1: types of communication to go across it. And back in
Speaker 1: the day, we used to talk about the Internet in
Speaker 1: the terms of the information super highway. You might be
Speaker 1: familiar with that term. So it was kind of the
Speaker 1: infrastructure that allowed rapid communication across the globe and allowed
Speaker 1: people who were on one computer network to communicate directly
Speaker 1: with people who are on a totally separate computer network
Speaker 1: because of this interconnectivity. Now the Web is just one
Speaker 1: way to send and consume information on that super highway.
Speaker 1: So you can think of it as a vehicle that
Speaker 1: shares the super highway with other vehicles. So the Web
Speaker 1: would be like a giant bus. And then you might
Speaker 1: have a freight train that's or not freight train, but
Speaker 1: a freight truck that's driving right next to it. That's
Speaker 1: file transfer protocol, or a bunch of mail vehicles in
Speaker 1: a I L that would stand for email, that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. These would all be traveling along the Internet.
Speaker 1: None of them are the Internet. They're just a means
Speaker 1: of communication that exists because the Internet is the platform
Speaker 1: upon which they exist. So you access the Web through
Speaker 1: a web browser. Big shock there, I'm sure we usually
Speaker 1: refer to that as the client. Your machine with the
Speaker 1: web browser is the client, and the browser or client
Speaker 1: lets you request information from another machine on the Internet,
Speaker 1: which we call a server. The server receives your request
Speaker 1: in response to it sends the relevant data back to you.
Speaker 1: And all of that has done through a visual interface.
Speaker 1: In other words, you've got something rendered out as uh,
Speaker 1: you know, something that's easy to to interpret and consume
Speaker 1: within the browser, as opposed to a text based approach
Speaker 1: that is, you know, marred by lots of code that
Speaker 1: might be really confusing to you. Now, the path taken
Speaker 1: by your request and the returning information isn't set in stone,
Speaker 1: so this is different from roads. This is where the
Speaker 1: road analogy really breaks down, because if you have a
Speaker 1: set of roads between you and your destination, you might
Speaker 1: be able to take a detour, or perhaps two detours.
Speaker 1: If things are really bad, let's say there's flooding, you
Speaker 1: can't get to where you are going using your normal routes.
Speaker 1: But the way the Internet goes it's way more robust
Speaker 1: than that. The information is delivered via packets. The packets
Speaker 1: all can travel different pathways to get to their destination,
Speaker 1: whereupon everything gets put back together and displayed for you.
Speaker 1: Now that's not just for Web information. That's for all
Speaker 1: information going across the Internet traffic. But it's uh one
Speaker 1: of the reasons why the Internet is so useful. It's
Speaker 1: that you don't have to worry if there is a
Speaker 1: break in the communication lines between you and the web
Speaker 1: server because the data can route around. That very important
Speaker 1: if you have machines that are constantly going on and offline.
Speaker 1: So back to the web. Now, the birthplace of the
Speaker 1: World Wide Web is CERN. That's the same organization that
Speaker 1: oversees the large hadron colliders. So we're talking particle physics
Speaker 1: and loll cats all because of CERN. Thanks CERN specifically
Speaker 1: say thanks to Tim berners Lee, who developed what would
Speaker 1: become the basis of the Worldwide Web on a Next computer.
Speaker 1: And uh, in case you're not familiar with what Next
Speaker 1: is or was, really, it was a computer platform developed
Speaker 1: by Steve Jobs after he had been forced from Apple.
Speaker 1: So Apple forced Steve Jobs out of the company or
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs quit, depending upon the person telling the story,
Speaker 1: and as a result, Steve Jobs then went on to
Speaker 1: found a new company called Next and develop a new
Speaker 1: type of computer. Eventually he would come back to Apple. Essentially,
Speaker 1: Apple begged Steve Jobs to return just as Apple was
Speaker 1: on the brink of bankruptcy, and Next kind of faded away.
Speaker 1: But it was the Next computer that Tim burners Lee
Speaker 1: was using to develop web pages and the first web browser.
Speaker 1: In fact, the first website was built in nine by
Speaker 1: Tim berners Lee, and he hosted it on his own computer.
Speaker 1: That site contained information about the purpose and structure of
Speaker 1: the web, so kind of an explanation of what the
Speaker 1: web would be capable of, and also a set of
Speaker 1: instructions on how to create your own web server, because
Speaker 1: obviously the web is only really useful if other people
Speaker 1: start to join on Otherwise it's just kind of a
Speaker 1: you know, you just logging remotely to someone else's computer.
Speaker 1: It's not that exciting now. The browser he built was
Speaker 1: called Worldwide Web. Just where we get that from, and
Speaker 1: things continued along a lot of research centers and students
Speaker 1: began to get access to the world Wide Web. But
Speaker 1: things really took off on April three. That's when uh
Speaker 1: CERN decided to release the Web to the general public,
Speaker 1: meaning they made the information itself on how the web
Speaker 1: works public and open. Along with the open license for
Speaker 1: the Web, SERN offered a basic browser and a library
Speaker 1: of code to help things move along, and it didn't
Speaker 1: take long for other organizations and eventually people and companies
Speaker 1: to join in. So also in three, the National Center
Speaker 1: for super Computing Applications or in c s A released
Speaker 1: Mosaic one point oh, and that became the first web
Speaker 1: browser to really find popularity among the general public. At
Speaker 1: this point, most of the people using the web were
Speaker 1: still researchers and students, but gradually people outside of these
Speaker 1: groups began to learn of the Web. It started to
Speaker 1: get press coverage, and people began to get excited by
Speaker 1: this concept of a computer network that you could access
Speaker 1: and find real information and communicate with people in real time.
Speaker 1: And here's a funny note. During this time, I was
Speaker 1: in college, and my first impression of the Web at
Speaker 1: that time was that it was slow, and it was
Speaker 1: unattractive and it was superfluous. I had become used to
Speaker 1: browsing the Internet using other means like tell net to
Speaker 1: connect to chat rooms or games or whatever, or even
Speaker 1: not full Internet access things like Bolton board systems, and
Speaker 1: I just thought that the graphical approach to the Web
Speaker 1: was completely unnecessary and slow things down. The browser had
Speaker 1: to take time to get the information and render the
Speaker 1: stuff you needed to see, and at the time, the
Speaker 1: Internet connectivity and the power of computers meant that that
Speaker 1: stuff took ages. And I just thought, well, who wants
Speaker 1: to sit around forever to try and get this information
Speaker 1: when you could get it so much faster using FTP
Speaker 1: or tell net or whatever it may be, depending upon
Speaker 1: the kind of information you're interested in. So I thought
Speaker 1: the Web was probably a flash in the pan. It
Speaker 1: would not be the last time I'd be radically wrong
Speaker 1: about the technology you think I'd learned. At any rate,
Speaker 1: by the Web was making headlines and e commerce became
Speaker 1: a thing One of the earliest examples I could find
Speaker 1: was that Pizza Hut sold a pizza online, actually allowing
Speaker 1: customers to order pizza in some areas using the web.
Speaker 1: The company Yahoo was founded around this time too, and
Speaker 1: its main purpose at that time was to serve as
Speaker 1: just a search engine to help search for the content
Speaker 1: on the web, making it easier for people to find
Speaker 1: stuff they wanted. Before search engines, it was pretty tough.
Speaker 1: You had to be kind of you kind of had
Speaker 1: to be part of the click that understood how the
Speaker 1: web worked. Now today, we're all used to things like
Speaker 1: you r l s where you have to type in
Speaker 1: a web address. In fact, there may be a couple
Speaker 1: of websites that you still navigate to by typing in
Speaker 1: the web address, but not everyone is comfortable with that.
Speaker 1: So search engines made it much easier for people to
Speaker 1: interact with the web without having to memorize the protocol
Speaker 1: that they would need in order to visit a specific website. Now,
Speaker 1: much later than the early nineties, we look back on
Speaker 1: the webs sites of this era as being pre Web
Speaker 1: two point oh. For the most part, you could probably
Speaker 1: call them web one point oh, but that's what we
Speaker 1: call a retroonym, meaning we named it after the thing
Speaker 1: had already happened. Uh. And it's kind of like World
Speaker 1: War One. While World War One was going on, no
Speaker 1: one referred to it as World War One. There had
Speaker 1: not been a World War two yet, there'd be no
Speaker 1: reason to call it world War one unless you expected
Speaker 1: there to be another one, so you might use something else,
Speaker 1: like the Great War. Uh. And it was only in
Speaker 1: in a you know, in retrospect, when World War Two
Speaker 1: broke out, that World War One really got that name.
Speaker 1: So what actually defines web one point oh? For lack
Speaker 1: of a better term, Not everyone even thinks web one
Speaker 1: point oh is is a thing at all? Like it?
Speaker 1: It doesn't make any sense, but some people will use
Speaker 1: that term. But wasn't actually described well. The websites in
Speaker 1: those days. Most of them were actually static pages, which
Speaker 1: means you would navigate to a page and see what
Speaker 1: was there, and after doing that, there'd probably be very
Speaker 1: little reason to ever return to that page because it's
Speaker 1: going to be pretty much the same. Uh. It's kind
Speaker 1: of like the equivalent of a magazine or a book.
Speaker 1: You know, if you go and you read a magazine
Speaker 1: and you close the magazine, then you come back to it,
Speaker 1: and you open it up to the same page, it's
Speaker 1: going to be the same magazine article. It doesn't change
Speaker 1: from one moment to the next. That's the way a
Speaker 1: lot of websites were in the early days. We're gonna
Speaker 1: make this episode even more dynamic and interactive in just
Speaker 1: a moment, but first, let's take a quick break. Those
Speaker 1: web pages didn't have any way for visitors to have
Speaker 1: any kind of meaningful interaction on the site. At most,
Speaker 1: there might be a visitor counter that would click up
Speaker 1: a notch each time someone navigated to the website, and
Speaker 1: those were a huge deal early on. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you guys remember, but I remember lots of websites
Speaker 1: having a visitor counter, and they took it as a
Speaker 1: matter of pride when they passed a arbitrary milestone like
Speaker 1: five thousand visitors or something like that. But there was
Speaker 1: no way to leave comments or have any other impact
Speaker 1: on the site for the most part for these types
Speaker 1: of web pages. Now there were exceptions. Some websites were
Speaker 1: dedicated to updating content regularly, or they were allowing people
Speaker 1: to leave their own contributions, or even both of those
Speaker 1: things at the same time. There was a student at
Speaker 1: Swarthmore College named Justin Hall who started up a web page,
Speaker 1: and originally it was just a collection of links that
Speaker 1: he thought were particularly interesting. The website was called Justin's Links,
Speaker 1: and not long after he started the site, he actually
Speaker 1: saw the potential to do something more with it than
Speaker 1: just show a collection of links, and he saw it
Speaker 1: as a way to publish his thoughts to a global audience,
Speaker 1: kind of like an online journal, and a lot of
Speaker 1: people point to Justin's Links as being the first blog uh.
Speaker 1: This sort of approach of using the web as sort
Speaker 1: of a dynamic communication tool set the side apart from
Speaker 1: a lot of the web pages that were around at
Speaker 1: the same time, but many sites lacked that sort of
Speaker 1: dynamic approach, and at the same time, companies began to
Speaker 1: rush the web in hopes of beating competitors to the punch.
Speaker 1: The web was viewed as kind of a Wild West
Speaker 1: type of territory in which a company could stake its
Speaker 1: claim online and stand to make a ton of money
Speaker 1: in the short term before everyone else caught up. Simultaneously,
Speaker 1: several companies emerged that used the web as the very
Speaker 1: foundation for the company itself. Some of them offered goods
Speaker 1: or services to consumers, so normal people who are just
Speaker 1: using the web themselves. Others were targeting other companies and
Speaker 1: they were offering up services meant to help businesses succeed.
Speaker 1: But many of these lacked any sort of cohesive business plan,
Speaker 1: which caused a big problem. They were offering up services
Speaker 1: that some people found helpful, but they didn't have any
Speaker 1: way of making money. And this obviously is not something
Speaker 1: that's just gone away. We've seen this with lots of
Speaker 1: different services, some of which exists solely as a means
Speaker 1: to try and get acquired by other larger businesses. UH,
Speaker 1: which can work if you have a great idea for
Speaker 1: a service or app that people are going to really
Speaker 1: enjoy using, but you don't have a way of generating
Speaker 1: money from that. It might just be good enough to
Speaker 1: get a lot of attention and then wait for someone
Speaker 1: to offer to buy you. You know, maybe they'll figure
Speaker 1: out a way of using it, or maybe they'll pair
Speaker 1: it with stuff they already have, and that's how it
Speaker 1: makes money. But back then, not having a plan just
Speaker 1: wasn't really working for people. Towards the end of the
Speaker 1: ninety nineties, web companies were sprouting up all over the place,
Speaker 1: and investors were really excited at the opportunity to get
Speaker 1: in on the ground floor of something that had the
Speaker 1: potential to become huge, meaning you could stand to become
Speaker 1: a millionaire overnight with some of these opportunities, and they
Speaker 1: began to flood startup companies with cash. More than a
Speaker 1: few of those startup companies ended up with way more
Speaker 1: money than what they needed, and that encouraged some bad
Speaker 1: decisions on the part of founders. A lot of founders
Speaker 1: began to spend that excess cash by creating lavish headquarters
Speaker 1: or crazy benefits for employees. Meanwhile, their businesses still didn't
Speaker 1: have a way of making revenue. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: let's say that you want to open up a lemonade stand,
Speaker 1: and normally you would just need a few dollars to
Speaker 1: buy some lemons and some sugar. You get some water,
Speaker 1: and then you put all that together. Maybe you get
Speaker 1: a little poster board to write up a sign. So
Speaker 1: maybe you're starting budget is twenty dollars and you're selling
Speaker 1: it for cents a cup, and you figure out that
Speaker 1: after certain number of cups, you know you've got plenty
Speaker 1: of of of supply. There after certain number of cups,
Speaker 1: you're going to break even. Uh, and then after that's
Speaker 1: all profit and you've got enough to make a decent
Speaker 1: profit over your investment. Well, now imagine that you are
Speaker 1: opening up that lemonade stand, but someone's given you twenty
Speaker 1: thousand dollars and you don't have any way of scaling
Speaker 1: up your operation, so you just spend that extra money
Speaker 1: on a really nice lemonade stand and you know, a
Speaker 1: super nifty titanium lemon crusher, that kind of stuff. It
Speaker 1: doesn't help you make money in the long run. It
Speaker 1: just means that's how you spent your your startup cash.
Speaker 1: A lot of companies fell into this trap. You can
Speaker 1: read about startups dot com industries in the late nineties
Speaker 1: and how ridiculously lavish some of their offices were, and
Speaker 1: it was a mess. So compounding that problem was the
Speaker 1: fact that a lot of these companies were rewarding employees
Speaker 1: by giving them shares of the company. Now, if everything
Speaker 1: was working, fine, that's great, because those shares are worth
Speaker 1: real money. Once you get to a point where the
Speaker 1: employees are allowed to sell those shares, usually there's a
Speaker 1: period where employees are not allowed to do that sort
Speaker 1: of thing until they get to a particular point in
Speaker 1: the fiscal year. But here's where the real problems came in,
Speaker 1: because a lot of these companies began to falter when
Speaker 1: people realized, hey, they don't really have a way of
Speaker 1: making money and they can only keep treading water with
Speaker 1: investment money for so long before everything falls apart. And
Speaker 1: it was like a house of cards. It all fell down,
Speaker 1: and it didn't all fall down on a single day.
Speaker 1: It's not like there's a particular day you can point
Speaker 1: to and say this is the day the bubble burst,
Speaker 1: the bubble meaning this speculation bubble of the value of
Speaker 1: dot com companies. Instead, it happened over a course of
Speaker 1: years from nine thousand one essentially, and during that time,
Speaker 1: people began to get more suspicious of dot com companies
Speaker 1: that began to ask harder questions. The companies themselves were
Speaker 1: starting to run out of that investment money, and because
Speaker 1: they hadn't found a way to generate enough revenue, they
Speaker 1: couldn't stay afloat, and a lot of them went completely
Speaker 1: out of business. Some of them took serious hits to
Speaker 1: their value. Amazon dot Com, for example, was around in
Speaker 1: those days and for a while had shares that were
Speaker 1: in the triple digit value, like over a hundred dollars
Speaker 1: a share, but after the bubble burst it dropped to
Speaker 1: less than ten dollars a share. Huge drop. But companies
Speaker 1: like Amazon were large enough and and savvy enough to
Speaker 1: wade through that time and emerge out the other side.
Speaker 1: Not all companies were so lucky, And the worst part
Speaker 1: of this is that those employees who had worked so
Speaker 1: hard and had been rewarded in stock now found themselves
Speaker 1: with worthless stock. The companies were bankrupt, so the shares
Speaker 1: were not worth anything, and that was a huge issue.
Speaker 1: So you had all these people who, for a while
Speaker 1: on paper were millionaires and then suddenly they were broke,
Speaker 1: or at least they weren't millionaires anymore. Many dot com
Speaker 1: companies went on to business um and those that stayed
Speaker 1: around people wanted to try and figure out, well, what
Speaker 1: what set them apart, what made them different? How did
Speaker 1: these companies survive, How did these websites make it through
Speaker 1: the dot com bubble burst while so many others went away?
Speaker 1: And that's where the term web two point oh really
Speaker 1: comes into play. Now. Personally, I think it's a dumb term.
Speaker 1: It's terrible. It suggests a chronological order, so it would
Speaker 1: suggest that there was first Web one point oh and
Speaker 1: then at some point there was a Web two point
Speaker 1: oh release. Because it's very similar to the way we
Speaker 1: look at software, for example, we're operating systems, but that's
Speaker 1: not what this means. It's not the way it works.
Speaker 1: So I think it's ultimately more confusing than helpful. But
Speaker 1: that's what we have, uh. And the truth is that
Speaker 1: both websites that were more in the Web one point
Speaker 1: oh frame than the Web two point oh frame and
Speaker 1: Web two point o websites existed at the same time.
Speaker 1: In other words, this wasn't chronological. You can't point to
Speaker 1: a date and say after this time all the websites
Speaker 1: were Web two point oh. Even back in with Justin's links,
Speaker 1: we start seeing Web two point oh philosophy working its
Speaker 1: way into websites, and that was years before the dot
Speaker 1: com bubble burst. So it's problematic using this term. But
Speaker 1: at any rate, we need to look at what actually happened,
Speaker 1: like why is this term around in the first place,
Speaker 1: And that's because of the O'Reilly Media company. So in
Speaker 1: two thousand four, Tim O'Reilly, who was the founder of
Speaker 1: O'Reilly Media, and Dale Dougherty, who was a VP and
Speaker 1: O'Reilly we're having a brainstorming session. They were trying to
Speaker 1: come up with a an event that could really focus
Speaker 1: on what makes a web company successful? Why were some
Speaker 1: web companies able to survive while so many others failed.
Speaker 1: What were the mistakes that the older websites made or
Speaker 1: the failed websites made, and what were the success stories?
Speaker 1: And so they started trying to think, well, how are
Speaker 1: we going to define this, what's the what's the way
Speaker 1: we create a catchy term to explain the new philosophy
Speaker 1: of the web, the one that survived. And that's where
Speaker 1: they came up with the term web two point oh.
Speaker 1: And that was it. It was just to give a
Speaker 1: name to a summit, the Web two point o Summit,
Speaker 1: which took place in two thousand four, and they had
Speaker 1: several since then. But they just wanted a way to say,
Speaker 1: these are the type of websites that did all right
Speaker 1: throughout the dot com by verse. These are the ones
Speaker 1: that had the traits that allowed them to survive. Now,
Speaker 1: in general, the qualities that define web two point oh
Speaker 1: are that they tend to be dynamic pages rather than
Speaker 1: static ones, meaning that there's a reason for you to
Speaker 1: go back and look at it again. It's not something
Speaker 1: that's going to be a page out of the encyclopedia
Speaker 1: and it never ever changes. That makes it Web two
Speaker 1: point oh. Another is that there tends to be some
Speaker 1: way for users to generate content and submit it to
Speaker 1: the website. That may be something along the lines of blogging,
Speaker 1: where the users are journaling using the web page as
Speaker 1: a place for their journal to go. Or it might
Speaker 1: be social media site where they're just reaching out to
Speaker 1: friends or sharing links or stories or jokes or whatever.
Speaker 1: Or it might be something more akin to Amazon, where
Speaker 1: users are able to review products that they've purchased, and
Speaker 1: that adds value to Amazon because us future customers can
Speaker 1: look at those reviews and make judgments, and then they
Speaker 1: too can contribute to this system, and that makes the
Speaker 1: whole experience of using Amazon more pleasant and robust and
Speaker 1: useful to both the company and the consumer. These are
Speaker 1: the sort of things that became known as the web
Speaker 1: two point oh qualities. This dynamic approach with user generated content,
Speaker 1: stuff that could be syndicated and be sent out across
Speaker 1: multiple platforms. All of that was wrapped up in this,
Speaker 1: and like I said, it does in fact cover things
Speaker 1: like social media sites. If you look back on the
Speaker 1: timeline of the major social media sites, they all emerged
Speaker 1: after the dot Com bubble burst. There really weren't any
Speaker 1: sites that kind of fall into that social media category
Speaker 1: the way we think of today pre dot Com bubble burst.
Speaker 1: Some of them were around right around then, like live journal,
Speaker 1: but even then you would you could argue live Journal
Speaker 1: was more of a blogging site and less of a
Speaker 1: social media site. Things like Friendster and MySpace and Facebook,
Speaker 1: all of those emerged after the dot Com bubble burst.
Speaker 1: But they also embrace the philosophy of what O'Reilly was
Speaker 1: calling web two point oh because those sites they aren't
Speaker 1: valuable on their own. I mean, you don't go to
Speaker 1: Facebook to see what Facebook has put up. You go
Speaker 1: to Facebook to see what your friends are saying, or
Speaker 1: to say something to your friends. It's the people who
Speaker 1: are using the site that give it value, and that's
Speaker 1: a big part of web two point oh. It and
Speaker 1: in fact, it takes a lot of the pressure off
Speaker 1: of the person creating the website. They have to make
Speaker 1: it attractive enough for people to adopt it. But then
Speaker 1: you just let the people make it important and you
Speaker 1: step back. Same thing is true for Twitter. Twitter just
Speaker 1: facilitates communication. It's the people using Twitter that make it useful.
Speaker 1: If no one jumped on Twitter, it wouldn't be around.
Speaker 1: There are other services that were similar to Twitter, some
Speaker 1: of which people thought were superior to Twitter, but they
Speaker 1: didn't get adopted as quickly, and they, for the most part,
Speaker 1: are not around anymore. While we're on our journey to
Speaker 1: Web three point oh, I guess let's uh, let's take
Speaker 1: arrest here. We're gonna take a quick break to thank
Speaker 1: our sponsor. So Web two point oh kind of points
Speaker 1: to this idea of embracing the consumer as a an
Speaker 1: integral part of your web presence. They're not just an audience,
Speaker 1: They're a contributor in some way. And you could argue
Speaker 1: the web two point oh isn't so much an evolution
Speaker 1: as it is just a different approach to creating an
Speaker 1: experience on the web, which also makes it difficult to
Speaker 1: talk about what comes next. I mean, is there a
Speaker 1: web three point oh? Does that even mean anything? Now?
Speaker 1: I would argue that we definitely have seen more evolution
Speaker 1: on the web since O'Reilly coined the web two point
Speaker 1: oh term, particularly when it comes to stuff like data tracking,
Speaker 1: that's huge, way bigger than it was in the mid
Speaker 1: two thousand's. Because of data tracking, sites can customize a
Speaker 1: user's experience and serve up advertising that is calculated to
Speaker 1: be more effective for that user. And depending upon the implementation,
Speaker 1: data tracking can be downright scary. And it turns out
Speaker 1: you don't have to share that much data before a
Speaker 1: computer can figure out who you are. Stuff that seems
Speaker 1: really general, like just a zip code, can be enough
Speaker 1: to narrow down just a few candidates. So if I
Speaker 1: put my zip code in and I have just maybe
Speaker 1: two or three other points of data, that might be
Speaker 1: enough for an algorithm to really narrow down between me
Speaker 1: and maybe one or two other people who I could
Speaker 1: possibly be. It's actually pretty, you know, surprising, how little
Speaker 1: information you need to share for that sort of stuff
Speaker 1: to happen. Also, we know that data tracking can be misused,
Speaker 1: either intentionally or not. There's the story about Target sending
Speaker 1: the young woman uh some a young woman some some
Speaker 1: coupons for expected mothers, and her father found out about
Speaker 1: it and was really upset at Target because he thought
Speaker 1: they had misidentified her. His daughter as being pregnant, and
Speaker 1: then later on he found out that in fact she
Speaker 1: was pregnant. But the whole point of that is that
Speaker 1: Target was trying to be proactive and helpful, but in
Speaker 1: fact caused a ruckus. It was a little too overenthusiastic
Speaker 1: of a response, as it turns out, and that's largely
Speaker 1: due to data tracking. You don't even have to identify
Speaker 1: a person or to create a problem. It's not like
Speaker 1: Target knew specifically who this young lady was. They just
Speaker 1: identified that based upon our searches, she must be pregnant.
Speaker 1: That's a problem. And we're seeing data tracking used and
Speaker 1: everything from innocent or at least seemingly innocent approaches like, well,
Speaker 1: you bought this one product, so here are five other
Speaker 1: products that you will probably like based upon your preferences
Speaker 1: that we've seen so far. That's not that creepy, But
Speaker 1: there are other approaches where data tracking is downright sinister.
Speaker 1: And I would argue that's a major part of the
Speaker 1: web experience now, whether you're aware of it or not,
Speaker 1: but it's definitely something that has evolved since Web two
Speaker 1: point oh. But another real jump in the evolution of
Speaker 1: the web comes to us because of mobile devices. Now.
Speaker 1: O'Reilly recognized the importance of mobile devices all the way
Speaker 1: back in two thousand four. O'Reilly Media said that interoperability
Speaker 1: was one of the features of Web two point one
Speaker 1: of the cornerstones of the philosophy, meaning that you should
Speaker 1: be able to access this web page from multiple platforms,
Speaker 1: whether it's a computer or a mobile device of some
Speaker 1: sort or something else. Now, in two thousand and four,
Speaker 1: there were really not that many devices that you could
Speaker 1: use to connect to the web non in a meaningful way.
Speaker 1: A lot of the phones that were out there were
Speaker 1: more like, you know, they have text browsers for the web,
Speaker 1: so you could read some text on certain web pages.
Speaker 1: It was pretty limited. It wasn't until the smartphone really
Speaker 1: took off here in the United States. That means it
Speaker 1: was after the introduction of the iPhone that you really
Speaker 1: started seeing that. So you get to a point now
Speaker 1: where more and more people are using mobile devices to
Speaker 1: access the web. I meant that web developers had to
Speaker 1: make sure they were paying closer attention to the mobile
Speaker 1: experience because if they ignored it, then a larger portion
Speaker 1: of their audience was going to get upset with how
Speaker 1: how clunky or unpleasant it was to access the website
Speaker 1: using a mobile device, and in fact it's more important
Speaker 1: than ever now. Uh. Just recently we've seen mobile browsing
Speaker 1: outpace desktop browsing. In other words, more more website visits
Speaker 1: are coming from mobile devices than desktop computers. That happened
Speaker 1: for the first time about a year ago, a little
Speaker 1: more than a year ago, and now we're seeing that
Speaker 1: more people are using mobile devices to access the web. Now,
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean that people have slacked off of using
Speaker 1: desktop computers or laptops. People still are using those devices.
Speaker 1: In fact, if you look at the trends, they're still
Speaker 1: increasing year over year. So in two thousand fifteen, there
Speaker 1: are more people accessing the web on desktops than there
Speaker 1: were in two thousand fourteen. It's just that the growth
Speaker 1: of mobile devices has skyrocketed, so it has outpaced the
Speaker 1: growth of desktops, so both of them are up. It's
Speaker 1: just mobile devices have increased much faster than desktop has.
Speaker 1: But that means you have to pay attention to the
Speaker 1: experience that your customers have. Your audience has both on
Speaker 1: mobile and on desktop. You want to make sure that
Speaker 1: it is attractive and usable and that people are able
Speaker 1: to get the experience they want depending up. You know,
Speaker 1: no matter what platform they happen to be using, whether
Speaker 1: it's a tablet or a smartphone, or a console or
Speaker 1: uh desktop computer, it needs to be a satisfying experience.
Speaker 1: So I would argue that is now really a defining
Speaker 1: feature of the web. And if I had to define
Speaker 1: web three point oh, I'd likely argue that it has
Speaker 1: to do with both the data tracking and the mobile
Speaker 1: devices more than pretty much anything else. But web experiences
Speaker 1: are becoming more customized to the individual browsers. So that
Speaker 1: could mean that one day will move into the era
Speaker 1: of the semantic web. Now, the semantic web is where
Speaker 1: your experience will be very much personalized, and the web
Speaker 1: itself will understand what it is you want to see
Speaker 1: based upon context, word choice, your preferences, all of these
Speaker 1: things that are wrapped up in things like data tracking
Speaker 1: and understanding of natural language, that kind of stuff. We're
Speaker 1: seeing a lot of development in that area. So maybe
Speaker 1: one day we'll have a semantic web where when I
Speaker 1: talk about surfing the web and when you talk about
Speaker 1: serving the web, it will be two very different stories
Speaker 1: because of our different styles. That's a possibility, but I
Speaker 1: also think it's really likely we're gonna see the web
Speaker 1: experience fracture as more services attempt to leverage various platforms.
Speaker 1: Now what do I mean by that? It's starting to
Speaker 1: sound like I'm talking business talk. But here's the simple
Speaker 1: example that I'll use to illustrate my point. Think about Netflix.
Speaker 1: So net extreaming has seen a ton of success over
Speaker 1: the past few years. Put aside their their library of
Speaker 1: movies and television series, which obviously mean that's that's problematic,
Speaker 1: but the adoption of Netflix has been phenomenal, and I
Speaker 1: would argue that our large reason for that is because
Speaker 1: you weren't limited to computers or mobile devices to access Netflix.
Speaker 1: You can access it on set top boxes, on video
Speaker 1: game consoles, and more. Pretty much if the device was
Speaker 1: capable of connecting to the internet. Netflix made sure it
Speaker 1: could have some kind of platform on that device. They
Speaker 1: wanted to get on everything they possibly could, and it
Speaker 1: meant that they had widespread adoption. Beyond that, they were
Speaker 1: really smart on the back end. They built out a
Speaker 1: system so that you could have a kind of seamless
Speaker 1: experience moving from one device to another. So if I
Speaker 1: start watching a movie under my Netflix account, on my
Speaker 1: laptop computer, and then I come home and I turn
Speaker 1: on my video game console and I launched my Netflix app.
Speaker 1: I can pick up where I left off because on
Speaker 1: the back end, it's tracking everything. The same is true
Speaker 1: for other services like YouTube. It's another great example. There
Speaker 1: are YouTube smartphone apps and tablet apps and video game
Speaker 1: console apps, and uh, that's the same sort of thing.
Speaker 1: My experience on one can translate over to another so
Speaker 1: that I can keep on building out this profile of
Speaker 1: what I like, and YouTube will continuously suggest other videos
Speaker 1: that are similar to ones that I've really enjoyed, which
Speaker 1: might be why I have so many videos of dogs
Speaker 1: on skateboards, or that could just be coincidence. I don't
Speaker 1: really understand how it works behind the scenes. At any rate,
Speaker 1: it's really interesting to me that that could potentially be
Speaker 1: the new era. It's not so much a Web three
Speaker 1: point oh as it could be a let's, you know,
Speaker 1: let's look at how we can make our service across
Speaker 1: all different platforms so people can access it however they want,
Speaker 1: and that goes beyond Web. In fact, Web might be
Speaker 1: too limited a term to use for that sort of thing,
Speaker 1: which means we kind of need a new term for it.
Speaker 1: We need to come up with a word that explains
Speaker 1: this particular world one where you have these services that
Speaker 1: go across all sorts of platforms, allowing you to access
Speaker 1: it however you like. And I think I've come up
Speaker 1: with a name. I'm calling it Frank. Frank's nice name.
Speaker 1: Robin Day's got a hedgehog called Frank. But seriously, I'd
Speaker 1: rather just kind of ditch the web two point oh
Speaker 1: term altogether, which might be a moot point. I don't
Speaker 1: know that anyone's still talking about web two point oh. Seriously,
Speaker 1: it's kind of a non term at this point. But
Speaker 1: I'd like to just erase it because I think web
Speaker 1: two point oh was too confusing a term. I think
Speaker 1: it misled people. It It compares the Web to things
Speaker 1: like software patches or software versions, and that's not accurate. Um,
Speaker 1: I really wish we could come up with a different
Speaker 1: phrase for that particular the idea that doesn't suggest an evolution,
Speaker 1: because it really was kind of a divergent path, not
Speaker 1: so much that one evolved into the other, but one
Speaker 1: approach was more successful than the other. I hope you
Speaker 1: guys enjoyed that classic episode of tech Stuff. If you
Speaker 1: have any suggestions for future episodes, you can contact me,
Speaker 1: write me at tech stuff at how stuff works dot com,
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