Why this blog?

March 15, 2009 - 2 minutes read

Humans need interaction. Web 2.0 has been, and still is, all about human interaction. Wikis, blogs, microblogs are all a wonderful way to organize information but, more important, are methods to empower the interaction with the other internet users. The web however is still far from “human” interactions… why we have to go to Facebook to see if there’s new content from friends?? Why the web can’t just say to me.. “Your friend has a new photoalbum”. Another example is the news.. Why i can’t go on the website of my preferite news agency and tell them that i want to be notified when an event with tag=X happens? Isn’t this more “human”??

Web 2.5 is perhaps a bit provocative as a blog title, but I really think that before any Semantic Web 3.0 something has to be laid down to provide a more human version of the web.

The human characteristic i am referring to is the real-time communication. IMHO Web 3.0 will come after this Web 2.5, and it will be used to filter this information.

The reason why i believe real-time has to be the next evolution is that its added value is positive for everybody, the producers, the consumers, websites, companies, users, etc… There is no strategic reason not to push information to the end users, there is no technical solution yet to be invented, what lacks now is integration with the existing web and experts in this field.

As regards semantic web, i personally think that companies will be afraid to push semantics too much. Of course websites could use microformats, but if data becomes independent from the context used (ex. website layout), what the user will remember is the data itself and not the brand of the company. This is not economically convenient.

Real-time communication is for me XMPP, AMQP, SIP, STOMP and others IM protocols. All of these provide ways to interact in a two-way mode, and real-time.

I consider techniques such as Comet, BOSH or any other technique based on long-live HTTP requests an intermediate and necessary step.

This is what i believe will be Web 2.5, and these are also the topics of the blog. By sharing these ideas I hope to start interesting debates and to friendly discuss viewpoints that could be legitimately different from mines.