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Saturday, July 01, 2006 Homo ConexusContinued from page 4 By James Fallows
In principle, we all recognize that nothing on the Internet is ever truly private. Messages sent from company e-mail accounts are in theory the company's property. Downloaded data passes through so many servers that it is no doubt stored by countless parties other than the sender and receiver. So far, for most people, this has seemed more a hypothetical problem than an urgent and unavoidable one. But if that changes, it'll mean a moment of Dodgeball truth for all of us, when we recognize that the Web 2.0 era belonged to younger, more trusting people. In practical terms, where does this leave me? With the experiment over, I doubt that I'll use Writely again. (Yes, it does most of what I want in a word processor -- but so does Word, and I can use that when I'm sitting on an airplane. Same for Google Spreadsheets versus Excel.) Maybe I'll check out YouTube when someone sends me an interesting link. I'll look at Wikipedia pages when they come up high in a search and I have a way to double-check any crucial facts. As for MySpace -- nah! But other applications have come to seem like natural parts of my daily life. Google Calendar is worth the effort -- for the appointments that my wife needs to know about. I find that I leave Google Earth running all day, to check aerial views of a foreign site I've just read about or a neighborhood where I'm meeting someone for lunch. The discount travel broker Kayak has gotten my attention; eBay has retained it, for all the obvious reasons. Flickr is a good way to share photo files with my family -- and keep them from jamming up my computer. I'll continue using Gmail as a backup site for important data files. As Ajax-enabled sites spread, they'll make sites that still require you to hit "refresh" or a "submit" button seem hopelessly out of date. I still don't like the label Web 2.0, I will continue to mock those who say "mash up," and I will never use Dodgeball. But I'm glad for what this experiment has forced me to see. James Fallows is a national correspondent for the Atlantic. |
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Building onto Facebook's Platform
07/31/2007
Comments
Guest (George Tsiolis - Agoracom.com) on 07/19/2006 at 12:00 AM
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We had to go through a similar experiment over the last 4 months as we prepared to redesign our website. The big decisions came when we had to make a distinction between what was cool (for lack of a better term) and what was useful. The distinctions weren't hard but we often asked ourselves if we were making a wrong decision by not seeing what others apparently were seeing.
We finalized our redesign the other day and decided to stick with items that would add real value. Your article makes me feel much better about our decisions and I thank you for that.
Best,
George
Guest (Amulek) on 07/25/2006 at 12:00 AM
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Guest (jem) on 07/25/2006 at 12:00 AM
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Guest (eandersphd) on 07/25/2006 at 12:00 AM
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Guest (mjc) on 07/25/2006 at 12:00 AM
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Huh?
Huh?
Guest (George & Dick) on 07/25/2006 at 12:00 AM
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madsci on 01/31/2007 at 7:12 PM
4
Guest (Bob Jacobson) on 07/27/2006 at 12:00 AM
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The long and short of it is that Web 2.0 is neither the hottest thing that the IT field has ever seen, nor is it pure chaos and fluff. It's just another turning of the Information Age wheel.
Guest (Catharine) on 07/27/2006 at 12:00 AM
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Web 2.0 aka A Big Hype... I checked out the Open Source Convention here in Portland today.... wish I had been at a Grateful Dead concert...
paoluc on 02/10/2007 at 1:03 PM
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