Ricky, harping on about Web 2.0… again

After I wrote a post about Web 2.0 not being here yet, Ben wrote a piece on the subject, arguing that the cool new things that are happening on the Web these days warrant a version increment. I left a comment on that post in which, as unlikely as it sounds, I drew an analogy between the Web and turkey basters. Now I think I have a much better metaphor for the evolution of the Web than product version numbers.

Historians, both the professional and casual kinds, refer to the various stages of human history with names such as “Stone Age”, “Bronze Age”, “Industrial Age” and so on. These names reflect the progress of humankind as they evolved from using crude stone implements to refined materials to machinery. The space in which humankind has always lived, Earth, provides the raw resources, which, as time passed, humans learned to refine and compose to make more useful things. But historians do not feel compelled to refer to Earth by a new name (Earth 2.0) simply because one of its inhabitant species got a bit clever and started manipulating the raw materials available to them in new and interesting ways.

The Web is an abstract space analogous to the Earth. It contains resources – protocols, scripting languages, hypertext and so forth – which may be refined and composed to create novel things. The first stage of human existence within the Web was the “Hypertext Age”. URLs, Hypertext and the accompanying Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) were the raw materials of the Web in its infancy. These raw materials were provided by the almighty Creator (Tim Berners-Lee). The next stage of the Web was the “Dynamic Age”, whereby CGI, servlets and so on injected some modicum of motion to the creations of the Web’s inhabitants, just like the invention of the steam engine triggered a comprehensive mechanisation of industry. We now find ourselves squarely in the “Social Age” of the Web, in which humankind has fashioned some extraordinarily powerful tools within the Web and the physical world to fulfill their innate desire to socialise. The “Social Age” of the Web was brought about by the serendipitous co-occurrence of a generation of people who desire social connectivity on a new level, a range of technologies such as camera phones and iPods and cheap digital storage, and clever ways of putting together existing Web technologies (think Ajax). What circumstances will arise to give humankind the push into the next age of the Web? What will the next age of the Web look like? What experiences will be had during that age?

I won’t be holding my breath waiting for the world to take up this metaphor for the history of humankind’s existence in the Web. The “Social Age” of the Web is not as snappy and catchy as “Web 2.0”. But maybe we’ll tire of incrementing version numbers by Web 11.0!