⚠ | In 2008, I published this article on Deflexion.com and in 2021, I migrated it to Infinite Ink. I have not yet updated it and, unfortunately, some of the links are broken. |
Cloud computing has been around since the beginning of the
internet
and,
actually,
in the beginning,
it was just the cloud. Back then you telnetted
to a host in the cloud and ran apps on that cloud-based host that
accessed cloud-based data. For example this is how email, Usenet, and
ftp worked. Let’s call that Web 0.0. The revolution that brought the
internet
to the masses was the creation of desktop apps that could
access the cloud. Let’s call that Web 1.0. With Web 2.0 there was a lot
of excitement about moving apps off the desktop and onto the cloud.
These web-based apps made it easy to run your apps and access your data
independent of what desktop computer you were using. To me this was
pretty much the same as Web 0.0, except instead of living in telnet
windows, you lived in browser windows. Now people are getting excited
about moving their web-based apps to the desktop. For example, look at
all the desktop-based Twitter
apps. And look at all the excitement about
rich Internet
application platforms such as
Adobe AIR,
Google Gears,
Microsoft
Silverlight, Mozilla Prism,
all of which bring WebApps to the desktop. So are we back at Web 1.0 or
is this Web 3.0? Or maybe Web
2.5?