6 ms·

As a Gen Xer, it's wryly amusing to hear today's internet referred to as "Web 2.0". What we have today is not what I think of when I hear "Web 2.0". I'm sure th

As a Gen Xer, it's wryly amusing to hear today's internet referred to as "Web 2.0". What we have today is not what I think of when I hear "Web 2.0". I'm sure there are internet scholars who can give some formal definitions and timelines, but to me Web 2.0 was the period roughly from 2002–2012, when the web had an age of amazing blogs, sites, videos, and (flash) games generated by individuals. I probably visited many dozens of different sites a week, which all had a very distinctive feel and perspective. I think that era ended due to a combination of a bunch of factors, particularly the iPhone, which defined the model for the modern smartphone. The iPhone favored an infinite scroll of bite-sized bits of content meant to go viral and a lot of the mindshare that was building web 2.0 sites, switched over to building mobile apps. It's easy to get nostalgic, but I miss Web 2.0. There are still very many interesting things going on on the internet, but they are largely filtered through the business models of a handful of mega-platforms that have a distorting effect.

laurencerowe 3y ago
I guess I think of the Web 2.0 transition as the technology change in the web stack where sites started to become JavaScript apps rather than server rendered pages which were basically the same tech as 1990s CGI. The change you’re talking about in 2002 or so was hugely significant but I feel it was all about wider adoption and emergence of social media (blogs and then MySpace) on the web which had previously been limited to the pre-web AOL, Compuserve, BBS world. Tech wise the web stack was still the same except being faster to access over ADSL rather than modems. Anyway that’s my geriatric millennial take having used AOL over a modem in the late 1990s then earning money as a web dev in college from 2000 or so. I hope we can at least agree that Web 3 has nothing to do with the Web!
- ehnto 3y ago
  From my view web 2.0 didn't have JS apps, jQuery/prototype/JS offered some interactivity but sites were still typically generated server side and delivered as renderable HTML/CSS rather than built on the fly by JS client side.
  - laurencerowe 3y ago
    What made Web 2.0 different from Web 1.0 in your classification?
    - alexvoda 3y ago
      Web forms! Sites were no longer a collection of documents. Instead there was sever driven iteractivity via forms and CGI. After Web 2.0 we were supposed to move onto 3.0 the Semantic Web. But it never cought on. Instead JavaScript, AJAX and SPA's exploded resulting in increased siloing and centralization. Later, when everyone forgot that the Semantic Web was 3.0, crypto bros appropriated that term for their NFT dystopia.
      - laurencerowe 3y ago
        Server driven interactivity became part of the Web from very early on. CGI dates back to 1993 and Web Forms were introduced with HTML 2 in 1994, before the first release of Netscape later that year. Yahoo added search in 1995. I guess for me, first using the Web in 1997, typing into a form and getting dynamic results back was what the web was. CGI was considered rather antiquated by the time I got my first web development job doing PHP and MySQL in the summer of 2001. By that point it was only really used for basic form2mail scripts and the like. Perl had long moved to embedding directly in Apache with mod_perl which dates back to 1996. https://webdevelopmenthistory.com/1993-cgi-scripts-and-early-server-side-web-programming/ https://webdevelopmenthistory.com/1993-cgi-scripts-and-early... https://opensource.com/life/16/11/perl-and-birth-dynamic-web https://opensource.com/life/16/11/perl-and-birth-dynamic-web https://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html https://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search http://marc.merlins.org/htmlearn/html2.html http://marc.merlins.org/htmlearn/html2.html https://perl.apache.org/about/history.html https://perl.apache.org/about/history.html https://www.php.net/manual/en/history.php.php https://www.php.net/manual/en/history.php.php
        alexvoda 3y ago
        Wasn't PHP a CGI script at first? The earliest use of the term "Web 2.0" was in 1999. This was way before what we associate today with "Web 2.0". Web 1.0 was retronymed in order to hype up how much better 2.0 was. And yes, web forms existed earlier but they define the difference between a web of hyperlinked documents and a web of services. On Web 1.0 if you wanted to create content you would create a website with any content you wanted on say GeoCities or just installed Apache on a computer and kept it running. The key word is "hyperlinked". On Web 2.0 if you wanted to create content you posted on a forum, commented on a comment section on someones blog, posted a video on YouTube, customized your page on MySpace later Facebook. Later this became far more centralized but even the early services that hosted user content were still 2.0. The key word is "interactive" All interactivity, even today, depends on form controls: buttons, text inputs, check-boxes, etc. . Web 3.0 was supposed to be the Semantic Web and allow all of the information on the web to be understandable by computers not just displayed. If this became a reality then there would be no need for APIs (the web would be the API), or for scraping. The key word is "machine-readable". Later Web3 was redefined to be about decentralization of some kind (even if many crypto-adjacent things rely on very centralized resources). Obviously, the key word is "decentralized". These are all very fuzzy marketing terms, buzzwords, and they don't really mean that much, but at least there is a vague theme that defines each one of them. All of these "versions" coexist so it isn't surprising that Web 2.0 services existed before the term was coined. Similarly, even if they are ignored, torrents are a Web3 like thing that predates Web3.
eyelidlessness 3y ago
I vaguely associate the 2.0 moniker with: - arbitrarily interactive web apps (GMail, blogs both hosted and otherwise, early social media that didn’t quite mirror BBSes but didn’t diverge much either) - design trends where web interfaces mimicked desktop interfaces (ahem, “lickable” buttons were a whole thing) - a whole lot of “anything goes” from the implied “1.0”, but the web was being treated as a serious platform not just Geocities and a few incumbents That last point really took from well before mobile apps business did. And that’s when the web really started sucking hard.
ksec 3y ago
>As a Gen Xer, it's wryly amusing to hear today's internet referred to as "Web 2.0" Yes. I stopped reading right there. Because Web 3.0 hasn't come, and the so call Gen Z, which at best are in the mid 20s. ( I thought Gen Z was suppose to be after 2000 but turns out they started in mid 90s ) They thought the current Internet as Web 2.0..... >Web 2.0 was the period roughly from 2002–2012 I agree. The death of Web 2.0 started when Smartphone arise ( from 2007 onwards ) and when we transition from Web 2.0 era to App era. I would even argue it was 2010, because from 2007 ( iPone introduction ) there was the push for HTML5 Apps, and later SPA and basically the start of the mess of Javascript Frontend . Web 2.0 to me is DHTML and later known as Ajax era. It is also funny we now have Gen Z rewriting the definition of "Workstation", "Web 2.0" and a lot of other terminology.
- deafpolygon 3y ago
  > Because Web 3.0 hasn't come Web 3.0 came and went.
  - GravityLabs 3y ago
    Web 3.0 is just starting!
    - jazzyjackson 3y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web in case you missed it
      - deafpolygon 3y ago
        Google killed it. It's been subsumed into the Analytic Web (and adverts).
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        deleted 3y ago
gxnxcxcx 3y ago
> I think that era ended due to a combination of a bunch of factors, particularly the iPhone, which defined the model for the modern smartphone. The iPhone favored an infinite scroll of bite-sized bits of content meant to go viral and a lot of the mindshare that was building web 2.0 sites, switched over to building mobile apps. Ahh, the transition from desktop computing to toilet computing.
ttepasse 3y ago
I remember when Tim O'Reilly coined the term Web 2.0 for a collection of unrelated web development and business practices. I don’t know if his essay holds up. https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.ht... Clearly something has changed from Web 1.0, but everyone sees that part of the elephant differently. If your interested in APIs, maybe the moment Web 2.0 died was when Twitter killed its RSS feeds. Technically true, but it doesn’t get the social change. As a „Xennial“ I’m with you: the blogosphere and independent homepages, loosely joined, was and is for me the truest expression how the Web should be. (But maybe that is just because we spend our early adulthood in that timespan.)

laurencerowe 3y ago

I guess I think of the Web 2.0 transition as the technology change in the web stack where sites started to become JavaScript apps rather than server rendered pages which were basically the same tech as 1990s CGI. The change you’re talking about in 2002 or so was hugely significant but I feel it was all about wider adoption and emergence of social media (blogs and then MySpace) on the web which had previously been limited to the pre-web AOL, Compuserve, BBS world. Tech wise the web stack was still the same except being faster to access over ADSL rather than modems. Anyway that’s my geriatric millennial take having used AOL over a modem in the late 1990s then earning money as a web dev in college from 2000 or so. I hope we can at least agree that Web 3 has nothing to do with the Web!

ehnto 3y ago
From my view web 2.0 didn't have JS apps, jQuery/prototype/JS offered some interactivity but sites were still typically generated server side and delivered as renderable HTML/CSS rather than built on the fly by JS client side.
- laurencerowe 3y ago
  What made Web 2.0 different from Web 1.0 in your classification?
  - alexvoda 3y ago
    Web forms! Sites were no longer a collection of documents. Instead there was sever driven iteractivity via forms and CGI. After Web 2.0 we were supposed to move onto 3.0 the Semantic Web. But it never cought on. Instead JavaScript, AJAX and SPA's exploded resulting in increased siloing and centralization. Later, when everyone forgot that the Semantic Web was 3.0, crypto bros appropriated that term for their NFT dystopia.
    - laurencerowe 3y ago
      Server driven interactivity became part of the Web from very early on. CGI dates back to 1993 and Web Forms were introduced with HTML 2 in 1994, before the first release of Netscape later that year. Yahoo added search in 1995. I guess for me, first using the Web in 1997, typing into a form and getting dynamic results back was what the web was. CGI was considered rather antiquated by the time I got my first web development job doing PHP and MySQL in the summer of 2001. By that point it was only really used for basic form2mail scripts and the like. Perl had long moved to embedding directly in Apache with mod_perl which dates back to 1996. https://webdevelopmenthistory.com/1993-cgi-scripts-and-early-server-side-web-programming/ https://webdevelopmenthistory.com/1993-cgi-scripts-and-early... https://opensource.com/life/16/11/perl-and-birth-dynamic-web https://opensource.com/life/16/11/perl-and-birth-dynamic-web https://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html https://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search http://marc.merlins.org/htmlearn/html2.html http://marc.merlins.org/htmlearn/html2.html https://perl.apache.org/about/history.html https://perl.apache.org/about/history.html https://www.php.net/manual/en/history.php.php https://www.php.net/manual/en/history.php.php
      - alexvoda 3y ago
        Wasn't PHP a CGI script at first? The earliest use of the term "Web 2.0" was in 1999. This was way before what we associate today with "Web 2.0". Web 1.0 was retronymed in order to hype up how much better 2.0 was. And yes, web forms existed earlier but they define the difference between a web of hyperlinked documents and a web of services. On Web 1.0 if you wanted to create content you would create a website with any content you wanted on say GeoCities or just installed Apache on a computer and kept it running. The key word is "hyperlinked". On Web 2.0 if you wanted to create content you posted on a forum, commented on a comment section on someones blog, posted a video on YouTube, customized your page on MySpace later Facebook. Later this became far more centralized but even the early services that hosted user content were still 2.0. The key word is "interactive" All interactivity, even today, depends on form controls: buttons, text inputs, check-boxes, etc. . Web 3.0 was supposed to be the Semantic Web and allow all of the information on the web to be understandable by computers not just displayed. If this became a reality then there would be no need for APIs (the web would be the API), or for scraping. The key word is "machine-readable". Later Web3 was redefined to be about decentralization of some kind (even if many crypto-adjacent things rely on very centralized resources). Obviously, the key word is "decentralized". These are all very fuzzy marketing terms, buzzwords, and they don't really mean that much, but at least there is a vague theme that defines each one of them. All of these "versions" coexist so it isn't surprising that Web 2.0 services existed before the term was coined. Similarly, even if they are ignored, torrents are a Web3 like thing that predates Web3.

eyelidlessness 3y ago

I vaguely associate the 2.0 moniker with: - arbitrarily interactive web apps (GMail, blogs both hosted and otherwise, early social media that didn’t quite mirror BBSes but didn’t diverge much either) - design trends where web interfaces mimicked desktop interfaces (ahem, “lickable” buttons were a whole thing) - a whole lot of “anything goes” from the implied “1.0”, but the web was being treated as a serious platform not just Geocities and a few incumbents That last point really took from well before mobile apps business did. And that’s when the web really started sucking hard.

ksec 3y ago

>As a Gen Xer, it's wryly amusing to hear today's internet referred to as "Web 2.0" Yes. I stopped reading right there. Because Web 3.0 hasn't come, and the so call Gen Z, which at best are in the mid 20s. ( I thought Gen Z was suppose to be after 2000 but turns out they started in mid 90s ) They thought the current Internet as Web 2.0..... >Web 2.0 was the period roughly from 2002–2012 I agree. The death of Web 2.0 started when Smartphone arise ( from 2007 onwards ) and when we transition from Web 2.0 era to App era. I would even argue it was 2010, because from 2007 ( iPone introduction ) there was the push for HTML5 Apps, and later SPA and basically the start of the mess of Javascript Frontend . Web 2.0 to me is DHTML and later known as Ajax era. It is also funny we now have Gen Z rewriting the definition of "Workstation", "Web 2.0" and a lot of other terminology.

deafpolygon 3y ago
> Because Web 3.0 hasn't come Web 3.0 came and went.
- GravityLabs 3y ago
  Web 3.0 is just starting!
  - jazzyjackson 3y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web in case you missed it
    - deafpolygon 3y ago
      Google killed it. It's been subsumed into the Analytic Web (and adverts).
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 3y ago

gxnxcxcx 3y ago

> I think that era ended due to a combination of a bunch of factors, particularly the iPhone, which defined the model for the modern smartphone. The iPhone favored an infinite scroll of bite-sized bits of content meant to go viral and a lot of the mindshare that was building web 2.0 sites, switched over to building mobile apps. Ahh, the transition from desktop computing to toilet computing.

ttepasse 3y ago

I remember when Tim O'Reilly coined the term Web 2.0 for a collection of unrelated web development and business practices. I don’t know if his essay holds up. https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.ht... Clearly something has changed from Web 1.0, but everyone sees that part of the elephant differently. If your interested in APIs, maybe the moment Web 2.0 died was when Twitter killed its RSS feeds. Technically true, but it doesn’t get the social change. As a „Xennial“ I’m with you: the blogosphere and independent homepages, loosely joined, was and is for me the truest expression how the Web should be. (But maybe that is just because we spend our early adulthood in that timespan.)