Is it true that finding solutions to problems in programming is more satisfying than discussing and stating ideas in writing? Or are these simply two kinds of people who prefer one over the other?

Carved in pixels, for reference

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It is a mobile phone with which you can make calls, write messages, add phone numbers in a contacts list, listen to music and watch videos, access the web and view the street maps. I am not kidding.

The list was chosen by a team of experts lead by Lev Grossman. In this video he explains the process of choosing The Best Inventions Of the Year. Just a note: at the very beginning you can clearly see how the Macintosh computer and the iPhone has made his work much more organized. I kid, I kid.

Although such lists can never be objective and are mostly meant to grab the attention of the newsstand surfers, they could at least try to be critical and explanatory about the items that were chosen to be included. The Time’s article about the iPhone exhibits neither of these characteristics and is more like a defense to why such irrelevant and overhyped consumer product was chosen.

Recipe for the Invention of the Year

According to the Time, the components of the greatest invention are the following:

1. The thing has to be pretty.
2. It must feel nice to touch it.
3. It has to imply that it will make other exactly the same things better.
4. It has to make you think that it is something greater than it is.
5. It has to make you believe that it will eventually become an invention sometime in future.

If the reason for choosing iPhone was this:

[W]e chose the iPhone as Invention of the Year, not merely for its revolutionary design and functionality but for how it will shape the future of communications.

then look at the Windows CE platform (also known as Windows Mobile) which has been powering touchscreen computer-like devices since 1996. Since 1996! Microsoft even opened the whole underlying source code for the application developers in 2006.

Every possible ‘mobile phone’ feature – from GPS, Google Maps, VOIP, Skype, Instant Messaging, 3G data transfer, Wifi, Bluetooth to business, media player and monitoring applications are already available for Windows Mobile based phones. There are enormous amounts of people who actually use smartphones and there are truly innovative applications being developed for them. Somehow the journalists seem to have missed it and view the iPhone as a revolutionary device.

One of the possible reasons for American journalists ignoring the Windows based phones could be the very specific U.S. mobile communications market. In the rest of the word people buy the phone that they actually want and use it with whatever network they fancy, while in the U.S. these are mostly subsides devices. Moreover, the prepaid package system discourages people from trying out new opportunities offered by higher speed data transfer availability. Therefore most of the iPhone worshipers probably haven’t used Google Maps, IM or a proper internet browser that were all available on other phones before the iPhone was introduced.

The Apple Innovation

The power of the Apple is the look & feel of their products and nobody will argue that the iPhone ‘looks pretty’ and is ‘nice’ to use, but it certainly isn’t an invention with regards to creating a mobile platform. At the same time its interface (not the touch-screen but the scrolling, flipping and resizing) is truly innovative and will definitely make other phone manufacturers realize the importance of it.

Some of the available Windows Mobile based phones and applications like PocketCM illustrate that Windows doesn’t mean ugly. Those examples also show the impact that the Apple has had on other phone manufacturers and software creators.

Reconsidering the Invention of the Year

The iPhone is clearly not the Invention of the Year because of the reasons mentioned above. But what could potentially make our lives better in future that was created this year? How about the ‘One Laptop per Child’ project, flexible fiber or the ankle-foot prosthesis. There is no such thing as a single most significant invention while there are many of them that have invaluable positive effect on different sides of our lives.

What are the most significant inventions for you this year?

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If definition means “the act of defining or making definite, distinct, or clear” then the definition of ‘web 2.0’ provided by Tim O’Reilly is neither distinct nor clear. He tries to put way too many things under a single umbrella, under one next version—the 2.0—while many of these things are in a continuous development with varying speed and can not be defined by ‘versions’.

On the first page of the article he formulates the “sense of web 2.0” by giving a few examples of how web 2.0 is different from Web 1.0, like, “publishing –> participation”, “content management systems –> wikis” and “Britannica Online –> Wikipedia”.

If these are the chosen examples to illustrate the principles of web 2.0, then the arrow used between them means something different in each of the examples, which however contradicts to the use of an equal type linguistic/symbolic link among all examples. As none of the known symbols of logic are used (like ⇒ or ∈), then lets try figure out what the author meant.

Does “publishing –> participation” mean that participation has become more important than publishing, or that there is an increase of participation over publishing? In any case, the value of blogs and wikis is their content; the value of a photo sharing site is the photos published and the tags added not the bare fact of people participating in this act.

The second statement “content management systems –> wikis” seems to be an equally bad one. What are people using for publishing their blogs — a wiki or a content management system? What are they using for collecting and organizing information? WordPress and MediaWiki are examples of a software for both — one powers enormous amounts of blogs while the other powers the Wikipedia. At the same time both Wikipedia and blogs are used as the primary examples to illustrate the idea of web 2.0. So what did O’Reilly exactly meant by using this “CMS –> wikis” example?

At the same time I do understand how people actually can understand or find their own formulation/sense of what the web 2.0 is. However, I would also argue that many of them who claim to have understood the web 2.0 don’t quite know how the web works, and what is unique about the increasing amounts of people contributing to it.

Many people would call facebook a typical web 2.0 application, while in fact it is a typical PHP software — no different than WordPress or MediaWiki. Now a lot of you will argue that those are its users (and that what they do) who make it a web 2.0 application, or that an API they provide for programmers, make it web 2.0.

So what exactly do you want to say about the facebook — do you want to describe how it enables user interaction or how it allows other programmers to use its data?

The lack of clarity and proper terminology is my single and only problem with bloggers/journalists using the term web 2.0, because they don’t get to the point of their message by simply labelling something web 2.0, and hence imply that they are talking about everything that Tim O’Reilly mentions in his article.

Bloggers and journalists (in press, TV and radio) should avoid using the term web 2.0 and concentrate on the particular subject of the web that they want to describe or analyse. There is a wealth of appropriate terminology that can be used to describe the web much better and more precisely than the buzzwords.

Suggested Reading

• “The Good, the Bad, And the ‘Web 2.0′” by Andrew Keen and David Weinberger in The Wall Street Journal — an excellent debate which illustrates that there is much more to the web than blogs, rss, podcasts and networking under the same web 2.0 cover.
• “Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense” by John Markoff in The New York Times already suggesting web 2.0, 3.0, 4.0…
• “Waiting for the Web 2.0 bubble to pop” by Jack Schofield in Guardian Blogs — isn’t such a title implying that either facebook, flickr or Wikipedia are to pop? Although it talks about the companies making business out of web 2.0, it doesn’t explain who is actually going to be hurt in case of such an event and how it matters to an average user of a web 2.0 website.

What do you think?

What is your view on the web 2.0 term? Do you use it, and if so, what is your definition of it?

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• The User-Generated Content Myth by Scott Karp where he perfectly explains that an average creator of a useful web content is not an average citizen.
• The Fakebook Generation by Alice Mathias who excellently describes the reasons for the popularity of social networking sites and what they actually mean to people using them.
• Facebook Is NOT For Business also by Scott Karp where he explains why the popular view of Facebook (or any other website of kind) being useful for business and during the business is false.

More Views About the Web and Journalism

Continuing the debate over the importance of professional journalism and the rising popularity of individual publishing, there are number of different viewpoints presented in the following blog posts:

• Let’s have a real debate about Web 2.0 by Suw Charman and Kevin Anderson,
• Still going: more of the NUJ debate by Shane Richmond,
• Is the Web as weak as its weakest link? by David Weinberger,
• The NUJ and me: a considered response by Roy Greenslade,
• Hands up those who think Web 2.0 is rubbish! by Sian Claire Owen.

While I may disagree to some of the views expressed in the above articles, I still think that most of the authors would be better of without using the term Web 2.0, to make their point clearer.

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