This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 11 Jun 2008, by Marco Díaz Calleja.
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11 Jun 08
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The Internet has changed the lives of many people, the possibilities it offers are endless. Today we live in a “web 2.0” world, which pushed the limits of creativity, collaboration, and sharing of thought. The main players of “web 2.0″, the wikis, the social bookmarking sites, photo management sites, blogging …etc are all tools that we have grown accustomed to. I for one could not imagine myself living without Digg, Google docs, Stumbleupon, Picasa, and a plethora of other tools. However the technologies powering most of these “web 2.0″ websites aren’t new at all, in fact they have existed for a long time. So why did it take such a long time for “web 2.0″ to emerge? I have a theory, read on.
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Let’s have a quick trip back to memory lane: Most observers consider the real birth of the Internet was in 1994. When the Internet got lots of attention from the public and the media, and started to grow exponentially
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By 1995, the browser industry seemed too lucrative for Microsoft to resist, it couldn’t keep its greedy mitts off of it, and decided to enter the browser market. This ignited the first browser war.
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by 1998, the Darth Vader of the IT industry emerged victorious on the browser front winning itself a virtual monopoly.
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Fast forward 6 years later, still no web 2.0, just the same old web that we are used to. Multimedia was still crappy as hell , there was no youtube yet. Socializing was mostly limited within forums and chat rooms, there was no digg, while facebook was still in it’s infancy. Wikis were just a niche tool within geeky circles. The technologies behind these websites and others are by no means new, and the ideas are to some extent aren’t really novel or groundbreaking, yet they were almost non-existent. But something happened in year 2004, the prodigious son came back with a vengeance! Yes Firefox with it’s roots traced back to Netscape came back utilizing a new weapon! It’s open sourced now and wanted to claim it’s thrown.
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With Firefox making inroads in Microsoft’s monopoly, the wheel of web development started to roll, creativity started to explode, things looked up again
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But not all is lost, there is a glimmer of hope. Yes two projects that are gaining steam, and are gaining lots of coverage. Google’s Android (also here and here ) and FIC’s OpenMoko (here and here) could serve as two platforms that could catapult the whole industry into the greener pastures. Both could play the role that Firefox played with the web.
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Android and OpenMoko will hopefully break the dead lock and help consumers realize what their phones could really do. Developers will flock to these two open systems, reminiscent of Firefox’s third party developer community 3 years back.
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