Hal Stern's thoughts on the economy, software, services, technology, and snowmen. Hal Stern: The Morning Snowman

I have at least generated some discussion by equating Web 2.0 with the read-write web. David Herron, AKA RoboGeek supplies a succinct counterpoint, claiming that more en vogue application architectures that compose services are exemplary of Web 2.0. If cost/click and search engine optimization are good examples of Web 2.0, I believe it's because there's meta-data created that gives the application hints (or more explicit advice) about what to do.

I'll be more blunt: I don't think there's an unique application model that defines Web 2.0. AJAX? Applications that mash up multiple sources of data? Asynchronous calls have been around for a while; you can perform an asynchronous application-to-application call via IBM's LU 6.2 protocol. I still have the scars from having done it a dozen years ago to make a customer service application function in something approximating real time (for a slow reader).

But that's beside the point -- asynchrony, or convolving multiple data sources, are application programming models. I still believe that Web 2.0 -- semantic web, Internet.next, whatever -- is defined by data models. I'll give David quite a bit of credit, because the counter-examples he raises are enabled by some of these new data models.