Some weeks ago I found in my room of my parents’ house a book about programming Java, mainly focused on applets. Applets are small pieces of software which can be included as a part of a web page. It’s funny, plus interesting, to read the introduction of this book (written 9 years ago, when web was 1.0), which claimed java applets as the key point of the future. “People will not use desktop applications, but java applets”. Nowadays we don’t use applets (except in some particular cases, like Processing or KGS). The predictions have not been accomplished.
Now we live on the Web 2.0. My personal description about the new version is:
– Web 1.0 – It was created to share knowledge, information.
– Web 2.0 – It was evolved to share emotions, feelings.
It seems perfect. But you know it’s not. Now a lot of people is predicting a future with web applications (like Google Calendar) and social communities (like Last.fm). The question is that now we have a perspective, and we have seen that some predictions from the past were wrong, so we can guess that most of what the people are defending now (in the name of Web 2.0!) will not be here in the future.
The Web 2.0 has some hidden problems, and little by little they’ll emerge.
For example, questions about privacy. Most of the social websites offer you a lot of functionalities, but in exchange they require you to show some of your personal stuff. Why do I want to show what I’m listening now (in Last.fm) or my last travel pictures (in Flickr) to everybody? I know there are options to hide some of this information, but even so, I have met people who have decided (for example) not to publish their baby pictures in Flickr because they are “not sure”.
Web 2.0, let it be, let it evolve!
Meanwhile we should start thinking on a bigger step: Internet 2.0. A new Internet protocol version, trying to avoid SPAM, Deny-of-Service problems, and creating new algorithms to increase the efficiency of the communication lines use.