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Comment by kahawe | Hacker News Reader

I think the point he made that "the internet is stale" resonates heavily with something I have always been feeling and wondering about the twitters, myspaces and facebooks... the whole "web 2.0" shenanigans.

Those were by no means "new inventions", it has all been there before on the web just on a different scale.. and now the non-techs are catching up and celebrating all the "great, new technology".

But the last truly revolutionary inventions and "paradigm shifts" certainly did not happen during the last 5-10 years and yes, on the whole the web IS pretty stale IMHO - and I dare to say you can see just how stale it really is by how much every new "genius" website gets praised and hyped as if it was an invention like electricity and just lifted us from the dark ages into the future.

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Actually,

As far as I can tell, what is really useful and really hard about maintaining and extending Facebook is that Facebook presents all the facilities of the Internet without the factors which tend to make these facilities feel "stale" in their 'native' form.

Facebook presents the equivalent of blogs, websites and emails in an appropriately filtered form. Their job is the job of a good host at a good party - keeping the conversation going without being visible oneself. And thus Facebook keeping its algorithms current is a very hard but fairly invisible job (the visible stuff is so simple a competent php programmer could do it in a month).

The Web 2.0 movement was about opening up the data in computer consumable formats and APIs. Nothing more.

While exchanging data over the internet is obviously nothing new, having large organizations provide easy programmable access to their private databases was somewhat revolutionary. The whole App craze was born out of being able to create new interfaces to existing services, thanks to Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 was nothing new from a technical perspective, but it was a revolutionary social shift.

Web 2.0 for me was mainly about user-generated content like blogs, wikis, social networking etc.

You could do a lot if not all of that before as a tech and not-so-much tech but chances were that you did not. "Blog" made it hip and cool for everyone to write a lot about usually not a lot - but if you wanted to have a website you could very well do so before.

I assume you mean RSS and what followed the blogs back then - but this was not really the main idea of Web 2.0. Web services were happening at the same time but they are not "the" web 2.0, in my opinion.

Wikipedia is roughly ten years old. Does that still count?

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