Over at Technology Review, in “Homo Conexus,” James Fallows reports the results of a two-week experiment in which he cast off desktop software and cast his lot with a collection of Web-based (“Web 2.0”) applications.
He finds that the new world is best for stuff that’s natural to share: calendars (Google Calendar) and photos (Flickr). The Achilles heel is connectivity: For instance, he uses Writely to compose the article itself and, inevitably, his Net connection drops in the middle, forcing him to reconstruct his work from local backups that he’d cautiously been keeping.
Fallows also senses a “tragic” potential in the essentially trusting (and, he argues, perhaps overly idealistic) framework of the new Web:
Every bit of the Web enterprise operates on trust. Web-based commerce has gone as far as it has because of the surprisingly low level of fraud and error…. all this depends on the basic trust that messages will go through undistorted, unintercepted, and in general unimpeded.
If problems like privacy breaches or indentity theft cause that trust to break down, he suggests, the Web 2.0 era may lose its innocence, along with the trust that keeps so many of its wheels turning.
If you live and breathe this stuff — if you religiously read TechCrunch and store your bookmarks in del.icio.us — then you’re unlikely to learn much new here, or to find Fallows’ sympathetic skepticism very congenial. But for the rest of us, the article is a useful reality check — a reminder that a lot of what early adopters get excited about isn’t yet ready to cause a mainstream stir.
[tags]web2.0, james fallows[/tags]
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