[CAnet - news] Web services - Web 2.0- and social-software systems

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[A long but very interesting essay on the real meaning of computing and
connecting and the importance of web services to the evolving Internet.
Thanks to Dave Macneil for this pointer. Some excerpts from the original
article - BSA]



>From the MIT Emerging Technologies Friday Update (07.08.2005)

http://wwwnl.technologyreview.com/t?ctl=E1C884:2ED00C7  

What You Missed: Continuous Computing 

The proliferation of cheap mobile gadgets, wireless Internet access for
everyone, a new Web built for sharing and self-expression...suddenly,
computing means connecting. By Wade Roush 
....

The third trend nudging us into a new era of computing is probably the most
important and the least expected. It is the emergence of the Web as a
platform for personal publishing and social software. The examples are as
diverse as informational sites such as blogs, craigslist, and Wikipedia
and services such as Gmail, LinkedIn, Flickr, and Delicious. All of these
are examples of what software developers and Internet pundits have begun to
call "Web 2.0": the transformation of the original Web of static documents
into a collection of pages that still look like documents but are actually
interfaces to full-fledged computing platforms. These Web-based services are
proliferating so fast because they can be built using shared, standardized
programming tools and languages developed, for the most part, by the
open-source-software community....

     ...Web-based social-software systems built in a largely unplanned way
by people using common programming languages and shared, open communications
protocols and development tools. These systems don't have to be designed as
unified, integrated systems, like  Project Oxygen's Intelligent Room, in
order to be useful tools for social computing; they can just as well emerge
from the bottom up, the way peer-to-peer networks and the Web itself did.
(Indeed, one reason that projects at PARC, Project Oxygen, and other labs
have never really blossomed into commercial systems may be that they are too
heavily  engineered for preconceived uses.)...





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