Social Computing and Badger's Paws

An anonymous reader writes "When Yahoo!'s Jeremy Zawodny recently asked What the heck is Web 2.0 anyway? he received a set of responses reminiscent of those garnered by The Register back in 2005, which famously concluded, based on its readers' responses, that Web 2.0 was made up of 12% badger's paws, 6% JavaScript worms, and 26% nothing. Nonetheless, as Social Computing (SoC) widens and deepens its footprint, another Jeremy — Jeremy Geelan — has asked if we are witnessing the death of 'Personal' Computing. SoC, Geelan notes, has already become an academic field of study. But perhaps Social Computing too is just badger's paws?"

Badgers belong firmly in web 1.0

Everyone knows that badgers [badgerbadgerbadger.com] are strictly a web 1.0 phenomena. (it's been around since the web went from 0.9b4 to 1.0 RC1)

Oh - anyone who hasn't already seen the animation linked above, make sure you watch right to the end - the punch line is hilarious! ;-)

Also

56% Slashdot.....

We didn't even make the cut

http://www.xkcd.com/c256.html [xkcd.com]

Slashdot wasn't even on this map!

Re:We didn't even make the cut

Yes it is, as /. , north of the sea of memes, with a coast on the viral straights.

Nothing

"But perhaps Social Computing too is just badger's paws?""

Nah... It's just nothing (as in move along, nothing to see here).

Obligatory Installing Linux on a Dead Badger Post

http://www.strangehorizons.com/2004/20040405/badge r.shtml [strangehorizons.com]

Beaver pawing too

Don't leave out our furry friends!

What's the other 56%?

Dark matter?

Re:What's the other 56%?

Poniez!!!

Re:What's the other 56%?

Marketing. Which is actually the total opposite of Dark Matter, you don't want to see it but it's highly visible and it has zero weight behind it.

web 2.0 is a buzz word

there is no technology called web 2.0, just mindless drones repeating it.

Tim O'Reilly?

What about Tim O'Reilly? He seems to take the whole "Web 2.0" buzzword he invented pretty seriously. Plus, as repeating it goes, I assume that having a Web 2.0 Summit (the next one is in October) would kinda qualify as repeating it.

Then again, he generally seems to take himself too seriously. What with the attempt to regulate blogosphere and all.

He's not the only one, though, since it wouldn't be much of a summit if only he was going there. There are a lot of people pining for the good ol' days of the 1.0 Bubble, and wanting to once again get big VC money for just having a web page and a sock puppet. Bubble 2.0 if you will. Cue trying to tell investors and each other that this time they're Web 2.0, see. Not the old failed Bubble 1.0, see. This time they have javascript and wikis and blogs and BitTorrent and whatnot, and a shiny happy everyone-participates model. _This_ time you'll get your money worth if you invest in them. Would they lie to you... again?

(And if that sounds stupid and made up, sadly it isn't made up. That's what makes Web 2.0 in Tim O'Reilly's own view and definition of it. See, it's 2.0, because now it has wikis, and blogs, and participation, and Google search, etc. And this time there's search engine optimization too, btw! And that all's _the_ recipe for not going bankrupt as a VC capital sink!)

Oh, wait... you meant perchance that nobody _sane_ is repeating it? Ok, in that case no objection.

26% nothing??!?

I'd say 100% nothing, much like the Emperor's New Clothes [wikipedia.org].

I thought Web 2.0 was Second Life.

Why yes I'll have an extra large helping of Fury Sex with my casino chips please! God that place sucks.

SoC

SoC, Geelan notes, has already become an academic field of study. But perhaps Social Computing too is just badger's paws?"

It certainly is, since SoC traditionally stands for System on Chip.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System-on-a-chip [wikipedia.org]

Clearly "Social Computing" doesn't have much to do with, well... computing.

You mean Web 2.0 is just a buzzword?

The shock! The horror! Say it ain't so.

Web 2.0 = Web 1.0 + marketing - page refreshes + dynamic content

So yeah, just do a little animation on your screen without the page refreshes, then hand it over to the marketing department and you'll be riding that next wave in no time all the way to the bank.

Not exactly, but close

Generally you got the right idea, but it's not just about marketting and not just dynamic content as such. If you read Tim O'Reilly's own explanations of it, since he invented and pushes the buzzword, it's more about techno-fetishism and the deep seated belief that a million monkeys on keyboards _can_ write Hamlet... if only they're on the Internet and have all the latest buzzwords.

E.g., he sees personal web pages as soo Web 1.0, and replaced by wikis in Web 2.0. No, really.

I mean, seriously, it's sooo pase to just have your own resume on your own homepage. Make it a wiki so everyone can edit it! Surely reality works by consensus, and a million bored strangers who never heard of you before are more qualified than you to fill that content! Or, bah, corporate web sites are so dull. Make it a wiki, so random strangers can spice it up. (That was sarcasm, btw.)

E.g., ditto for sources of information. Having an authoritative source is soo Web 1.0, when you could just have a wiki instead. Wikis are the Web 2.0 way! And I don't even mean the sane way of using, say, Wikipedia as a starting point and following the links to the authoritative sources. No, no, no. He sees wikis as the _replacement_.

E.g., publishing content is soo Web 1.0. You should have everyone participate! Participation is the Web 2.0 way, don't you know?

So, yeah, forget about writing your own press releases and product manuals and FAQs. Let the community participate! Let perfect strangers and competitors spice it up. Imagine the possibilities! Imagine the excitement of checking each day to find out what perversions someone added to your company or product info! (Yep, you guessed, sarcasm.)

E.g., buying servers (e.g., from Akamai) to distribute your patches and executables is soo web 1.0. The Web 2.0 way is BitTorrent. Get on with the times.

I mean, hey, look at how excited WoW players were to get their ADSL's _outbound_ pipe stuffed up by a modified BitTorrent to download the patches. Not to mention at times being stuck with sucking a huge patch through a straw, from 1-2 other people's outbound pipe. Surely they'd barf if they could download the same patch in 5 minutes from a dedicated server without the hassle. (Sarcasm too, btw. It was actually a major gripe about WoW. See, for example, the Penny Arcade strip.)

Etc.

Now don't get me wrong, I can see some point in some of that stuff if it's an extra. Providing a forum for the users is pretty much expected anyway, and offering a torrent in _addition_ to the plain old download can't hurt at least. But presenting it as the _replacement_ to the boring old Web 1.0 stuff is... brain dead. It takes an unhealthy dose of techno-fetishism and techno-utopianism to see everything solvable by just more network buzzwords and a million networked monkeys writing reality by consensus.

It does fit with his other brain-damaged ideas, though, such as the call for censoring and regulating the blogosphere. The guy genuinely seems _that_ convinced that he can forge a whole utopian society on the Internet.

Re:Not exactly, but close

_If_ you're giving away your work for free, ok, none of us has any expectations as to how. Whatever works for you, really.

The problem is that Tim O'Reily sees BitTorrent as a successor not to Sourceforge, but to Akamai. Which is distributed servers for large companies. We're talking the likes of MS, Yahoo, Symantec, AOL, etc. I don't think many people bought Akamai hosting for some small freeware utility they wrote.

And it's positioning it _there_ that makes me have a trouble with it. If I paid a ton of money for, say, Vista, the keywords are: paid money. We're not talking some free content. I think the least they can do is give me the patches in a fast and convenient way. I _don't_ want to use my outbound pipe, and having it stuffed, to participate in sharing MS's patches. MS can just keep paying for some civilized hosting, thank you very much.

That's really why I used the WoW patches as an example, because it's just what irks me. I'm paying a ton of money, and they can't even host their own freaking patches. It's not freeware and, frankly, I _don't_ think I have any obligation to chip in a little to help Blizzard's bottom line some more.

And if that kind of crap is (part of) what Web 2.0 is all about, then: no, thanks.

That, in a nutshell is all that bothers me about that part of the Web 2.0 concept.

Foot fetishists of the world unite

Footprints deepening, badger's paws...I'm sensing a definite theme! And if my SoCs keep widening, how long before they won't fit in my SHoEs?

Web 2.5 is Facebook.com

(In case you haven't noticed.)

And if you have noticed, notice also that that's what all the HS and college folks entering right now will expect in terms of networkable social interaction. All content, across all devices, intelligently displayed, adapted to me.

I'm just waiting for Amazon.com to buy Facebook out.

Social computing? Their own enemy?

No wonder web2 isn't going to last: http://www.verbumvanum.org/shirky/index.html [verbumvanum.org]

web 2.0...

.. It's a fancy name for sites that use AJAX and have glass icons.

Why the 'o' in SoC?

Why is Social Computing abbreviated as SoC? What's wrong with SC?

The eternal quest for money

The Internet used to be a geek's refuge - a place where adults exchanged views about important matters, and whiny people with emotional itches were noticeable by their absence. Another activity that was pretty rigorously excluded was "business" - defined (by me) as the attempt to earn the largest pile of money in the shortest time with the minimum effort, without being heavily punished by the criminal justice system. This blissful state of affairs still held good (more or less) when the sainted TBL invented the Web and gave it to us all without let, hindrance, or vig.

Pretty soon the Web grew and grew, and attracted the attention of those who perch, vulture-like, incessantly scanning the horizon for signs of free meals. How could they extract industrial quantities of money from this popular, but apparently useless phenomenon? The hunt was on, and an early burst of enthusiasm (the Dot Com era) led to general disappointment (the Dot Bomb crash).

But now there are more and more practical ways to make money from the Web, and those who find money more fascinating than technology, universal communication, planetary groupthink, etc., need a label to denote the Web in its capacity as a revenue stream. That is the essential meaning of "Web 2.0".

Finally it's all clear

So, "Web 2.0" is finally explained in an article that concludes by quoting a bumper sticker. Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?

Web 2.0 is "after the crash"

I think the main reason "Web 2.0" has taken hold as a buzzword is the crash of 2000. There was a huge ramp-up in internet hype all the way from 1994 to around 2000 or so, driven largely (in the popular consciousness) by Netscape. Then came the stock market crash, and along with it came down all the dot-coms. Then we had a nuclear winter, where online advertising was officially dead, and nobody could get a job, and there was no startup funding for anything "fun" any more.

Then the new phase gradually started, with Google leading the way toward cool AJAX applications that actually worked (Google Maps being the prime example, for me anyway, that made me go "wow! cool!"). AJAX basically enabled more interactive applications where you could click on something and something would happen without a whole new page being loaded. So stuff like rating posts and moving maps became much easier and more desktop-like.

Basically, Web 2.0 is an expression of the first big wave (1990's) followed by the crash, followed by the second wave. I don't think it's really about any particular technology or social networking (we had that before, just in slightly more basic form); it's more about the second wind, the second chance, the second go around the hype machine. So now we again start to have companies that have lots of users, but no revenue to speak of, being bought for billions of dollars. And so it goes.

Web 3.0 will not come until there has been another crash, and another nuclear winter, and another resurgance on the back of some new, apparently minor tweak that makes people go "wow! cool!" all over again.

you can do ANYTHING on web 2.0

zombo.com told me so [slashdot.org]

Whereas before?

Jeremy Geelan writes [blogspot.com]:

Social Computing leverages, through technology, the genius of groups. It is as simple, and as wonderful, as that.

Whereas before we needed, say, Hitler.

SoC in need of a technological breakthrough

It's nice to see SoC so passionately discussed and even becoming a field of study, but before SoC really can establish itself as a reality, I think we need a technological breakthrough.

Why?

Because there is a complete mismatch between present web technology and social dynamics. We're like trying to reach the moon by building a rocket with LEGO blocks. No wonder there is so much vaporware behind the concept of web 2.0.

Current web technology, in the way it works and in the way it is presented to the user, is still tied to the network topology. The user is very much aware of crossing boundaries between machines connected to the internet. However the network architecture and topology is completely out of touch with the reality of social networks and communities. The velocity at which the social network evolves (links between people, groups of people, and their resources) is an order of magnitude higher than the speed at which the computer network evolves, so it's quite limiting for the former to piggy back its evolution to the latter. When it comes to bringing people together into a common virtual space the most successful initiatives are found when the user model does not depend on the computer network topology: network games, Second Life, Skype, etc. All these provide "spaces" that, once entered, no longer rely on the network topology to provide meaning.

So in order to realize the SoC vision I believe we first need an architecture where the network topology is completely transparent, and I would even say, irrelevant. The user should no longer feel like navigating a set of interconnected machines and have to bother with stuff like server names, ports, who owns the server, etc. Instead, what the user should be aware of when navigating the social web are communities, their members, their boundaries, their resources, their connections, and so on. In other words we're talking about a whole layer on top of the internet with a distributed and common object model. What a user understands as 'community' or 'network' should have a clear representative on the net regardless of the computer resources involved. Right now the concept of community does not even have a real representation on the web. All we have are sets of users of certain web sites or web resources. But where do we capture the fact that an individual is part of multiple communities? How do we specify a community by aggregation of other communities (e.g. neighborhoods aggregate into a whole city)? How do we manage communities with "moving" boundaries, e.g. those that work or have worked at a certain company? Unless we develop a new social layer based on a common object model on top of the web, the social computing ideals will be dead in the water because there is a complete disconnection between the computer network model and the social network reality.

In order for SoC to become reality we need major building blocks such as identity (for both individuals and groups), reputation services, directories, ontologies, etc. For all this to work together I don't think it's enough to be plucking low hanging fruits by developing protocols This and That. For SoC to really exists I believe we should think in terms of a new OS for the web. I expect more to come out from croquet (http://www.croquetproject.org/ [croquetproject.org]) than from RDF and usual web 3.0 contenders.

Re:Uh, I'm sorry.

I think I echo GP when I say "Badger Paws? WTF?"

Your explaination doesn't exactly make it clearer. WTF does that have to do with badgers' paws?