Up front: a vocal and public thank-you, for sending links or notes about sites or distros, to anyone who does. I always appreciate it if you take a second to write and tell me about something. And I often overlook news or interesting events, so it helps.
A couple of days ago I got a link to a post about frustrations with Web 2.0; it’s available in German or in English. At the end, there is a call for a “Web 3.0,” which would somehow unify all the top-shelf services, into a giant orgiastic ball of social clickery. (Hyperbole is mine. 😉 )
To answer the original note I got: I really don’t have an opinion one way or another. Let me explain.
I complain a lot about bloat and unnecessary frills and useless Web services that don’t really offer any content, just splash and dash. And I stand by those comments.
Sites with lightbox logins or endless flash-driven utilities are impediments, and those fripperies are just masking the fact that a site or a company has nothing substantial to offer. Search your feelings. You know it to be true.
In short, to quote an American friend from a long time ago: “You can put lipstick on a pig, and it’s still a pig.”
CLI-based programs do a great job of lopping off all the dreck and dredge, and leaving you with the information you wanted in the first place. To paraphrase myself. 😉
From that, you might infer that for me, things like Facebookendsterwitterspace are obstacles to be removed, before I can get what I want out of the Internet. And you’d be right.
But more so, whether or not there is a unifying social network service is of little interest to me, mostly because I don’t use those services to start with.
If you do, and you look forward to a day when Facebookendsterwitterspace becomes a reality (and when Ubuntu latches itself to it automatically), that is fine with me.
If you happen to be something of a hybrid, and enjoy using those services from the command line (which is not impossible), I can only assure you that you are probably not alone. Someone will no doubt write a tool that will interface with it, and keep you rolling.
I’m in the mood today that says if you use it, and you like it, and you feel no pain from the demands it makes on your system … then by all means, enjoy life. The world is out there waiting for you to explore it, one mouse click at a time.
And I also am in the mood today that says if you’re like me, and you don’t need Web x.0 to make your life complete, then … well, then life goes on. 
Motho ke motho ka botho 
From my perspective Web x.0 is only useful if it brings new IP address system with it. New IPs are required to continue the growth. Every fridge should have an IP (joke).
Otherwise I am happy with current Web.
Yet again you fail to see that the web, as well as technology has to move forward. Why do we have copious amounts of fans spinning away at thousands of rpm per second, water cooling, and laptops that overheat under the strain and levels we push them to? Do they have feelings? No. They’re meant to “cry out in pain” as you old hardware-lovin’ geeks would claim! That’s how we progress into the future and build the marvellous landfills of metal and silicon we have today. Not only does it benefit our economy (both technology and waste disposal) and allow good, honest computer manufactures (using professional Chinese kids) to make bigger and better components but supplies as with real, modern, professional systems that can enjoy the full potential of the web as it it is today, and the future.
It’s people like you that would have the printing industry go back to black and white. I bet you’re one of these soppy sentimentalists that loves his black and white films as well? Well I damn right refuse to watch Casablanca in anything but full colour and hate the flick anyway — no CGI, what a load of old rubbish — just like the unprofessional useless junk you’re using here.
Sorry, can’t hear you. I’m just enjoying the 6 months life expectancy I have left on this laptop as I’m buffering 12 YouTube videos at once. Envious? I bet you are — you don’t have Flash installed mainly because your junk can’t handle it! Roll on Web 4.0! I’ll be in the front seat, and loving it.
It is obvious that you do now know what you are talking about. I am developer and we have been making ajax/web applications since 2001, all of which require intensive javascript operations. However I don’t believe that using 3d transformation on buttons is essential to the stucture of the web, it is more to please people like you and other that are inclined to be easily impressed by presentation. The fact is that we pay special kind of professionals, namely ‘designers’ to come up with fancy, dancing, bubling, doing all sort of unneeded things stuff on a web page just to make people like you having the ‘impressed’ make-believe in their head so they will ‘notice’ products/services.
I am sorry to disappoint you, but K. can buffer 100+ youtube videos on a box like yours, and I dare you – watch at least 9 of them at the same time using mplayer, I know because I did it. Having my windows trasnaprent and having 3d accelerated gaussian blur on their ‘transparent’ parts is not really any productivity bust. Nor is the ability to buffer several YT videos. A productivity bust would be for you to sit on your butt and do some work instead of talking things you know nothing about. Like how computer advancements are developing our world.
This said, I know professionals that need extreamly powerful machines to do their work, like CAD/CAM and stuff. For them the fact it can be done on a computer alone is a productivity bust as once they were doing it on paper sheets, 10sq feet at once sometimes. So yeah, for them advancement is good. But for people who slack all day, write emails and watch youtube it is not. Nor is for gamers, wasting their time in physical inactivity and destroying the little social skills they might once have.
Obvious Troll – 1
Reply Troll – Trolled
Sometimes, I really do think we need a sarcasm symbol on our keyboards. (Personally I think that symbol already exists as the windows key, but that’s not the point.)
The only point I disagree with you guys on is the gamers jab. Games have become a heck of a lot more socially inclined in the last ten years. Online Game-space is swiftly becoming it’s own communications platform. (If you don’t see it, look at the organization of a WoW raid on youtube.) This sort of argument was used against chess when it came out, too. That it was an indoor activity that simply wasted time with no benefit to society. Victorians tried to ban the game in England at one point.
Does the average joe-shmoe non-gamer-non-animator-non-cad type person need the latest and shiny-ist? Nope. Not even close. But then again people are starting to recognize that. One word: Netbook. They maybe running on recently fabricated processors out of Intel or AMD, but they are a definite step back in computing power compared to even the last generation chips. The only things they retained out of chip advancement was the size decrease. Adding to the netbook backstep, the rise of the iPad is another good example. That thing did away with parallel processing! That has been a part of modern computing for what… 20+? Granted some of this is the novelty factor, and some of it is thrift. (That’s in the case of netbooks rather than the iPaid …err… iPad.)
Unfortunately, the computers were not really built to last. It is a fairly rare computer that lasts to make it into K.’s hands. Parts of them might, but most computers really do turn into junk. The tough, long-lifetime computer revolution has yet to happen, though it likely will before too long. When that happens we will put a lot of professional Chinese kids out of jobs.
Thanks for this, Mr Professional. I got a smile out of it. 😀
@Mr. Professional: go away, little troll and come back after you’ve learned to troll properly.
In my opinion, the future of the web will be (or should be) the Semantic Web. More structured data that we can use from within other applications besides a full browser using 48 cores to render a webpage.
This, by being more machine readable, will be usable by any app including CLI ones, without the need to render the HTML and CSS and click on stuff.
More automation, more possibilities, less time wasting waiting for stuff to load or copy-pasting and manually aggregating content.
But we all need to contribute by adjusting our own websites. People using CMS based websites (like this blog), it’ll be easier: just install one of the available plugins[1] – no need to do anything else. For custom software it’ll be harder, but the advantages are good enough, I hope.
[1] http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/semantic-web
Mr Professional, congratz with your laptop. Buffering flash? And you called yourself Mr.Proffesional? It makes me scratch behind my ears.. Funny but I thought that a pro and new-tech junkie would go for the HTML5 standard.
Well each to their own I say!
If you want the latest in flash with all it’s inherent security flaws then I say good, go for it! Alternatively, if you want to use Lynx to browse the web and just have a text only web then fine again – I do both.
Having been on the net since 94 I have seen just about everything and nothing I see today is innovative, it’s all a rehash of yesterdays idea’s like IRC >> Forums >> Facebook. We’ve always had social networking, it’s nothing new that came with the net since day one. The difference is really the audience and I hate to say it but it’s a dumb audience in general willing to divulge their toilet habits or worse on Twitter etc… Let’s here that phrase again, “Lipstick on a pig”
Oh, and just because some of us like older computers doesn’t make us an e-luddite, it’s just a bit of fun basically and fun is what’s sadly lacking in the world today.
I sort-of agree with you on this. The only reason I like twitter is because it’s a new kind of high-speed RSS service. Not so with Facebook, which I hate. And the only reason I use twitter is because of gwibber, since I still haven’t found a way to access my RSS feeds easily from the desktop.
However, none of these things use flash or other client-side scripting languages. And since I’m studying professional IT, I can say that every course promotes server-side scripting instead of client-side scripting. Except javascript but only for breadcrumps to make site navigation easier.
Btw, HTML/CSS/Javascript = Uber-Combo!
I have to relate a tale from this afternoon’s Christmas shopping trip in our local town. My wife and I were in a stationers and booksellers, laden down with gifts and we dutifully joined the queue for the check out.
A tall, inelegant and somewhat unattractive woman joined the queue ahead of us by a couple of people – acting as if she was talking to a friend of hers already in the queue. In fact she was queue jumping. Very un-British. Anyway, I bit my lip, as I was in a good mood, and coping well with busy shops and lots of people.
The woman was finally called to the checkout, and finished paying for her goods as we were called to the adjacent till. Instead of moving away, she started to apply lipstick.
I couldn’t help myself, I turned to my wife and said, quite loudly, ” You know, you can put lipstick on a pig, but its still a pig”. My wife, knowing exactly what I was talking about, went bright red and into a fit of quiet giggles. The woman glared at me and walked off. I felt good. 😀 We paid for our items and left the shop, at which point, my wife, who was nearly purple in the face by now, burst out laughing in the street.
Thank you KMandla, you made our Christmas 🙂
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