What enabled web 2.0
In my web 2.0 class at Cooper Union, we have talked about what enabled web 2.0, Sanford’s argument is Moore’s law. I have a slightly different take.
None of the things we are doing with web 2.0 are particularly new in computers (other than video), what is new is the medium. Computers could drag and drop graphical elements in the 80’s, they could communicate with one another in the 70’s and the 80’s, they could accept user generated content in the 70’s (think data entry clerks typing into terminals connected to a mainframe). Hardware wasn’t the primary limiting factor preventing web2.0 type apps in the mid 90’s , programmers were.
Programmers had a lot to get used to with the web in the mid 90’s, writing portable code was more important than ever before (HTML/Javascript) and there was a whole wealth of possibilities that most programmers hadn’t wrapped their minds around yet. Some were there, Slashdot especially pops to mind. But on the whole it took them a while to familiarize themselves with the concepts of interactive community oriented sites, and get the basics firmly established (dynamically generated pages, web servers communicating with databases). Once they did, and saw other people building web 2.0 type apps they said “Hey this isn’t that hard, I can do that” and they did, thus we have now have a lot of web 2.0 apps now.