A new buzzword: Social Media
Quite old in fact. As old as Web 2.0. In fact, social media is a by-product of Web 2.0.
What's Web 2.0?
Honestly, it's a marketing hype. In reality, it tries to define a changing landscape on how we all communicating via Internet. The poster boys of Web 2.0 are Facebook and Myspace and Twitter.
It also tries to characterize how we are catching up with everyone using the latest Web technology.
Somebody gave it a name for all these "Facebook-me, and Twits me too" thing, and the name is Social Media.
Big deal?
Yes, but not as big as email. It help us get connected with lost friends and lots of them, but it can't beat two killer apps that we all loved since the stone age of Internet:
1. Email
The real deal is still email. Email is the killer apps of the Internet. It's as old as ARPANET Email and as new as Gmail. It's ubiquitous - home, corporations, shops, etc.
It's the ultimate Web application.
2. Chat
The next big thing after email on the Internet. It's the extension of email. If the email thread is unbearably long, the next logical step is to chat it out. Chat make our life casual and relax. We thus found chatting less during working hour, and more during leisure time with family members, relatives and friends.
Without the ability to send "email" (or message) and "chat", one can hardly claim he is developing a Web 2.0 application and try to label it as "Oh, this is my social media apps", because the apps doesn't pass my Web 1.0 test - email and chat.
In this regard, for me, Twitter is still an old application delivered in a new way:
Short text messages, serve as asynchronous chat, and delivered to the people who subscribe it.
Hence, if someone says that a Twitter-like application is a Web 2.0, for me it's just a hype.
Whatever we have since ARPANet is already complete, except that, our messages are delivered in a new way with the latest technology. Assigning a different name to the platform (i.e World Wide Web), where what we're talking is the "method" of sending the messages, is misleading at best.
This is because the Web is evolving all the time since its inception in the 1990s. So when do we have Web 1.5? Nobody knows.
We're all living in a constant changing of Web technologies. Assigning a few apps to a new buzzword seems unnecessary.
A place to breathe
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
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About Me
- syamsulhasran
- I'm currently a software engineer. My specific interest is games and networking. I'm running software company called Nusantara Software.
2 comments:
I felt that Web 2.0 is not just hype. Yes, it is a hype name. But it does has its reasons. There is indeed a tremendous change more than ever before on how web content is presented to users.
And in fact, I am amazed by the Web 2.0 era. Web content is richer than before.. and more dynamic... and lively... and so so much more.
Even web email interface has been web-2.0-ed with Gmail starting the trend first followed by Yahoo Beta and then hotmail.
I think this video says it all:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g&feature=player_embedded
LK,
Our previous generation has been
amazed on how
1. Unix - the operating system that promotes collaboration
2. ARPANet/Internet - that enables us to send texts to anywhere in the world, and upload our information on a sharable disk space.
3. The Web browser - that let us browse an HTML page, the subset of XML markup language.
4. Chat - that let us chat with people around the world in real-time
4. Google - that pulls relevant information around in the Net
And what's Facebook, Blogger, Twitter, etc?
It's just an evolution of how humans exchanging data.
BTW, cool video. I think I want to do that too.
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