What’s next after Web 2.0? Cloud Computing? Maybe. The Semantic Web? Possibly. The problem with defining what’s next, is that Web 2.0 wasn’t a distinct new technology but is better described as a social movement. The technologies that sprung up to facilitate this new model of user interaction were a collection of re-purposed old technologies with some new, but I can’t think of any that were fundamentally paradigm shifts.
A few months ago I was hiring. I was looking for some engineers for a contract. One resume that crossed my desk listed as a skill, “Web 2.0″. I posted to facebook, what does this mean? The answer from one of my friends, “it means that they surf all day”. Given the ease one can lose hours to “facebooking”, there is a ring of truth in this. 1 in 8 couples married this year met through social media. Think about it.
My point though, is that Web 2.0 isn’t really a technical skill set. Perhaps the job applicant meant to say AJAX or Drupal. But there isn’t a technology one can put their finger on as *the* Web 2.0 technology.
The wikipedia entry for web 2.0 is a good read. The Criticism section points out that many of the ideas that Web 2.0 were already implemented. The article in general supports my contention that web 2.0 is a social revolution not a technological one. Content creation power was placed into everyone’s hands. Networking online got taken up to a new level.
So what’s next? One thing I think bears watching is the possible fragmentation of the web, at least from the search perspective. Google web search is only one way to find things. You can discover sites through social networking, youtube and twitter search. Communities that focus on niches are becoming more prevalent (although they have always been there).
Regardless, it will take us a while to digest Web 2.0 and the next really big thing could be some time in coming. Although I’m sure there is someone out there working to prove me wrong.
Everyone wants their site to be found by google, right? Who wouldn’t want more free traffic delivered to their site? The goal of getting onto page 1 of the SERPs (search engine result pages) is such a holy grail, that a whole service industry called search engine optimization has come into it’s own.
But traffic doesn’t always come from the search engines. And some online businesses are not at all interested in marketing to just anyone, but rather just to a targeted clientele that comes to them virally rather via search.
Meet invitation only sites such as Rue La La a luxury e-tailer that seeks to promote an air of exclusivity. To become a member, you have to be invited, and only then can you have access to its discounted designer goods.
Putting your site behind an authentication prompt, which Rue La La has done, is one way to hide your pages from the search engines. Another is through directives in a file, robots.txt, you place on your site. Sites such as Gilt Groupe, another invite only site have excluded many of their site’s directories from the spiders.
So if you are searching for a killer deal on that Gucci bag online, be aware there are certain sites that are completely hidden from you unless you are “in the know”.
After poking around at both Hybrid and Thematic, wordpress frameworks, I went with Thematic. The reason? Better documentation. I followed Hybrid’s instructions on installing a child theme and and got a broken theme. I was more successful with Skelton, but felt overwhelmed by the amount of work I need to do in css land to get to a reasonable looking theme. So in the end I installed Thematic which has some basic layout css files prepackaged to get you started with your child theme. Of course my decision to go with Thematic may reflect some learning challenges on my part, but in the end, Thematic got me quicker to where I needed to be.
Note this project is for a separate blog, not this one. The cobbler’s children makes do with last year’s shoes.
A bit more on frameworks and why you should care. Using a WP framework gives you some separation between functionality and presentation, always a worthy goal. And it allows you to subclass (well kind or) distinct functional components while preserving the ability to upgrade the originals. What I mean by this, is that you can copy a php file (say header.php) from the parent theme to your child theme directory and alter the copy. Wordpress, in it’s later versions, knows to look first for the php files in the child theme. The idea here is that when wordpress and the parent theme is upgraded, there is some insulation … I’ll let you know how that goes when I get there.