Web 2.0 and Tim O'Reilly as Marshal Tito | The Register

A provocative perspective, via Nicholas Carr, who notes "Thompson's critique of the reigning Web 2.0 ideology deserves a close reading and, one hopes, will spark some constructive debate." 

Ajax is touted as the answer for developers who want to offer users a richer client experience without having to go the trouble of writing a real application, but if the long term goal is to turn the network from a series of tubes connecting clients and servers into a distributed computing environment then we cannot rely on Javascript and XML since they do not offer the stability, scalability or effective resource discovery that we need.

There is a massive difference between rewriting Web pages on the fly with Javascript and reengineering the network to support message passing between distributed objects, a difference that too many Web 2.0 advocates seem willing to ignore. It may have been twenty years since Sun Microsystems trademarked the phrase ‘the network is the computer’ but we’re still a decade off delivering, and if we stick with Ajax there is a real danger that we will never get there.

Source: Web 2.0 and Tim O'Reilly as Marshal Tito | The Register