4 ms·

You wrote, '"Web 2.0" is all about new ways of computing which exploit parallelism.' I've seen many descriptions of "Web 2.0" but that's a new one to me. Or to

by troymc 15y ago

You wrote, '"Web 2.0" is all about new ways of computing which exploit parallelism.' I've seen many descriptions of "Web 2.0" but that's a new one to me. Or to quote Inigo Montoya, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." Here's Tim O'Reilly's explanation: http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html

shalmanese 15y ago
I took it to mean one of the side effects of Web 2.0 is increased familiarity with massively parallel computation.
ChuckMcM 15y ago
Web 1.0 was bigger and bigger SMP servers, Sun was that 'dot' in "Dot Com" and "Grid" was the thing. Web 2.0 is Beowulf type and other shared nothing clusters where the only 'fabric' between processes is the network and the parallelism and the service API is an emergent property of the cluster of servers not of any one server. Web 2.0 is where you can run a web application locally in some co-location facility that is pulling its data off the S3 cloud at Amazon across the country. Web 2.0 is the difference between a SQL server that creaks under the load of a million queries per day and a noSQL cluster that does billions of queries a day. A looooooong time ago I challenged Sun's executive management with the question "What are we going to do when a 'big yellow hose'[1] runs through everyone's living room?", Eric Schmidt (who was the senior director of the Systems Group at the time) felt the challenge was a bit over the top since getting 10 megabits of network bandwidth to everyone's house wasn't really on anybody's road map (and we had just done a deal with AT&T which thinking that maybe in 10 years 30% of the households would have an ISDN line). I had just come up for air after looking at how to build a network service that, like the Andrew File System, didn't exist on any one server, it existed on all servers. That was one of those 'oh wow' moments, sort of a 'we are all under-estimating this' kinda thing. So for me the explosion of bandwidth was the fundamental moving force behind the evolution of the web, you could assume that data could be on the far side of the country and you'd have a chance of getting it to show to the user before they died of boredom. And when that is true, what were the boundaries of the system then? What were the invariants? Working at Google, and now Blekko, is hugely exciting because the friction between data sets is so much lower you can do awesome things. So my 'backplane' can be 4,000 sq ft of data center and I can fit a whole lot of machines into that 4,000 sq ft, and I can easily give everyone of them a small piece of a problem. Or the same problem where different things are assumed to be true. And they can all return their answers and those answers can be correlated, evaluated, formatted, and outputted in the blink of an eye. That I contend is Web 2.0. [1] At the time the long haul version of 10 megabit ethernet was a large diameter yellow cable with marks where you could install vampire taps.
- InclinedPlane 15y ago
  Web 1.0 was the web as a publishing platform with a sprinkling of limited applications that do all of their heavy lifting on the backend. Web 1.0 was about cgi-bin, it was about lycos and yahoo and mapquest, it was about geocities and "under construction" pages and Fortune 500 companies with static websites consisting of a handful of pages, none of them terribly interesting. Web 2.0 was a dramatic reshaping of what was possible with the web. It was about the web as a full-fledged application and communication platform. Web 2.0 was about AJAX, and web-mail, and wikis, and blogging and commenting, and google maps, and sites with social features, etc. In the Web 1.0 era if you wanted to share information with the world you bought some hosting and you set up your own site where you put up a handful of hand-edited html pages. If people wanted to have a conversation with you on the web they would have to email you or make a comment on their own site. In the Web 2.0 era you turned to one of many platforms (blogger, wordpress, web forums, livejournal, etc.) and you started blogging, or making podcasts, or making web comics, or doing whatever suited your fancy. And to have a conversation people used the same medium, they commented on your blog posts or they talked to you on a forum, or they commented on your flickr photos, etc. Fundamentally web 1.0 is about static data from a handful of authors, web 2.0 is about dynamic data from a myriad of contributors. Most of Web 2.0 runs on ordinary PHP and MySQL servers, the SQL vs. NoSQL division doesn't play a part in it.
  - wisty 15y ago
    I think Web2.0 was when many things started going super-linear. 1 customer isn't just another customer, they are more SEO, more content, more "Likes", more network effect. It's also about standardization (which is also kind of super-linear) - if you code to a standard interface, you no longer need to code to every interface. I'm not such a fan of AJAX. You can make a punch-the-monkey game in AJAX, and it's just web 1.0 all over again. You could be something like Facebook with little more than static HTML. AJAX is a tool, not a revolution. It's a good tool, but that's it. The same goes for NoSQL servers.
- eternalban 15y ago
  Your points are domain e.g. search specific and the fact that you can get away with delegating the "SM" of the SMP to a cluster in the backend in "Google, and now Blekko". That's basically an economic model and for your domain, it works. It doesn't apply to everyone. The concern is that for general purpose computing the free lunch is over. "Web 2.0 is the difference between a SQL server that creaks under the load of a million queries per day and a noSQL cluster that does billions of queries a day." Right. No one is gonna sue you if your search results are affected by eventual consistency. The world is not just about "queries". Some happen to care about "transactions" at scale .. I do agree that all the recent tech-pop fretting over this is a bit of a johnny come lately phenomena.

by troymc 15y ago

shalmanese 15y ago

I took it to mean one of the side effects of Web 2.0 is increased familiarity with massively parallel computation.

ChuckMcM 15y ago

Web 1.0 was bigger and bigger SMP servers, Sun was that 'dot' in "Dot Com" and "Grid" was the thing. Web 2.0 is Beowulf type and other shared nothing clusters where the only 'fabric' between processes is the network and the parallelism and the service API is an emergent property of the cluster of servers not of any one server. Web 2.0 is where you can run a web application locally in some co-location facility that is pulling its data off the S3 cloud at Amazon across the country. Web 2.0 is the difference between a SQL server that creaks under the load of a million queries per day and a noSQL cluster that does billions of queries a day. A looooooong time ago I challenged Sun's executive management with the question "What are we going to do when a 'big yellow hose'[1] runs through everyone's living room?", Eric Schmidt (who was the senior director of the Systems Group at the time) felt the challenge was a bit over the top since getting 10 megabits of network bandwidth to everyone's house wasn't really on anybody's road map (and we had just done a deal with AT&T which thinking that maybe in 10 years 30% of the households would have an ISDN line). I had just come up for air after looking at how to build a network service that, like the Andrew File System, didn't exist on any one server, it existed on all servers. That was one of those 'oh wow' moments, sort of a 'we are all under-estimating this' kinda thing. So for me the explosion of bandwidth was the fundamental moving force behind the evolution of the web, you could assume that data could be on the far side of the country and you'd have a chance of getting it to show to the user before they died of boredom. And when that is true, what were the boundaries of the system then? What were the invariants? Working at Google, and now Blekko, is hugely exciting because the friction between data sets is so much lower you can do awesome things. So my 'backplane' can be 4,000 sq ft of data center and I can fit a whole lot of machines into that 4,000 sq ft, and I can easily give everyone of them a small piece of a problem. Or the same problem where different things are assumed to be true. And they can all return their answers and those answers can be correlated, evaluated, formatted, and outputted in the blink of an eye. That I contend is Web 2.0. [1] At the time the long haul version of 10 megabit ethernet was a large diameter yellow cable with marks where you could install vampire taps.

InclinedPlane 15y ago
Web 1.0 was the web as a publishing platform with a sprinkling of limited applications that do all of their heavy lifting on the backend. Web 1.0 was about cgi-bin, it was about lycos and yahoo and mapquest, it was about geocities and "under construction" pages and Fortune 500 companies with static websites consisting of a handful of pages, none of them terribly interesting. Web 2.0 was a dramatic reshaping of what was possible with the web. It was about the web as a full-fledged application and communication platform. Web 2.0 was about AJAX, and web-mail, and wikis, and blogging and commenting, and google maps, and sites with social features, etc. In the Web 1.0 era if you wanted to share information with the world you bought some hosting and you set up your own site where you put up a handful of hand-edited html pages. If people wanted to have a conversation with you on the web they would have to email you or make a comment on their own site. In the Web 2.0 era you turned to one of many platforms (blogger, wordpress, web forums, livejournal, etc.) and you started blogging, or making podcasts, or making web comics, or doing whatever suited your fancy. And to have a conversation people used the same medium, they commented on your blog posts or they talked to you on a forum, or they commented on your flickr photos, etc. Fundamentally web 1.0 is about static data from a handful of authors, web 2.0 is about dynamic data from a myriad of contributors. Most of Web 2.0 runs on ordinary PHP and MySQL servers, the SQL vs. NoSQL division doesn't play a part in it.
- wisty 15y ago
  I think Web2.0 was when many things started going super-linear. 1 customer isn't just another customer, they are more SEO, more content, more "Likes", more network effect. It's also about standardization (which is also kind of super-linear) - if you code to a standard interface, you no longer need to code to every interface. I'm not such a fan of AJAX. You can make a punch-the-monkey game in AJAX, and it's just web 1.0 all over again. You could be something like Facebook with little more than static HTML. AJAX is a tool, not a revolution. It's a good tool, but that's it. The same goes for NoSQL servers.
eternalban 15y ago
Your points are domain e.g. search specific and the fact that you can get away with delegating the "SM" of the SMP to a cluster in the backend in "Google, and now Blekko". That's basically an economic model and for your domain, it works. It doesn't apply to everyone. The concern is that for general purpose computing the free lunch is over. "Web 2.0 is the difference between a SQL server that creaks under the load of a million queries per day and a noSQL cluster that does billions of queries a day." Right. No one is gonna sue you if your search results are affected by eventual consistency. The world is not just about "queries". Some happen to care about "transactions" at scale .. I do agree that all the recent tech-pop fretting over this is a bit of a johnny come lately phenomena.