Web 2.0 for Who?
I note with interest this announcement by Stephen Downes of a forthcoming MyGlu, which:
performs the functionality of SuprGlu - that is, it brings together different RSS feeds into a single display - does it in such a way as to allow you to put your Glu on your own site, allows you to use feeds other than your own, and lets you filter the output.
In addition, Stephen will
make the script available (and it's pretty simple to run). And don't have to use my site - or SuprGlu's - at all.
The rationale?
Web 2.0 is supposed to be all about empowering the user and distributing content, not the manifestation of some eyeball-driven business plan. I wish more coders (and pundits) would recognize that.
Now I agree with those sentiments wholeheartedly, but I think it's fair to ask the question: Web 2.0 allows
who to do all this neat remixing and mashing stuff?
I think there are three broad ways of making the most of Web2.0 in an interoperability/mashing sense (rather than a content co-creation sense):
- Web site users who can make use of the services offered by SuprGlu, are happy adding content feeds to google/ig or netvibes etc., can possibly work out how to pull a feed from one place and consume it in another, and so on. Tese users proibably also need the site to be well designed in terms of usability, and probably also prefer a friendly visual design, bright colour theme etc etc. For the sake of argument, let's also suppose these users have never seen a bit of html or javascript and wouldn't know what to do with it if they did.
- Client side, web page developers, who can tinker with html and at least reuse/call on other people's Javscript functions, even if they don't know how to write Javascript (i.e. they can di a script include); at the other end of the spectrum in this category are experienced Javascript developers who can write their own elaborate Javascripted pages and develop, from scratch, complex web page application (i.e. web pages that embed functionality on the client side using script). Client side developers don't have access to servers, can't mount PHP scripts etc.
- Server side developers, that again spread across quite a wide spectrum, from users who can ask a friendly sys admin to put up a script, users who can install a script but wouldn't know what to do if it failed to work, and can only administer it through a provided web page interface, that ideally handles configuration too, users who can install a script off the web and are happy to cutomise it, and users who can write complex scripts from scratch etc.
(Okay - okay, so things like Ning will perhaps change all this - opening up the ability to reuse complex server side) functionality through a free web page interface...but I don't think we're there quite yet in terms of (naive) users knowing what services there are out there that they can make use of.)
So - while I'm looking forward to making use of Stephen's script, I also think that services such as SuprGlu do - and will continue - to provide the most accessible/usable service for the majority of web users.
Posted by ajh59 at January 10, 2006 12:22 PM