Web 2.0 is giving me a case of déjà vu. Computing networks have come full-circle in my humble opinion.
In the beginning there was the command line but there was also the thin-client dumb terminal that served applications to end users: mail, text editors, programming, games, tools, business applications.
What does Web 2.0 mean? Wikipedia says, “Web 2.0 is a term often applied to a perceived ongoing transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of websites to a full-fledged computing platform serving web applications to end users. Ultimately Web 2.0 services are expected to replace desktop computing applications for many purposes.”
Déjà vu.
That is how the Internet worked before cheap and plentiful desktop computing moved computing applications from the server to the desktop. We have gone full-circle.
Thin client solutions, server-loaded services, rich-text integration, and collaborative load- and work-sharing have been everpresent from the very birth of the computing network, especially when computing was both monetarily and resource expensive. The dumb terminal was Web 2.0 and Gnu Emacs was Web 2.0 and IRC is 2.0. Even more recently, I was using VNC for over ten years.
I guess one may argue that what was once only possible at universities and corporations over a 10mbps or 100mbps LAN in the past is now possible in an always-on, high bandwidth 1.5mbps+ WAN known as the Wnternet or Web.
That might be so. That may well be so. But is isn’t new, it isn’t innovation, it is merely an evolution of a very old, very sound, and 70s and 80s-era thin client, client/server, model where the only variable that has changed is bandwidth.
Most of the services, applications, and solutions offered can very readily be accomplished with Gnu Emacs.
