Web 2.0 back in the open arena - game on!

From TechCrunch

The platform wars are over. Long live the Web. That was the basic message delivered by Jeff Huber, Google’s vice president of engineering, in a ten-minute presentation at Web 2.0 a few minutes ago. His talk was nominally about widgets (which Google calls Gadgets).

What we see is applications fundamentally changing. Just like the model for content changed from monolithic sites, now applications are going to be feeds and containers.

A lot that you have heard here is about platforms and who is going to win. That is Paleolithic thinking. The Web has already won. The web is the Platform. So let’s go build the programmable Web

The Mosaic moment of Web 2.0? Not really, two things are different:

(i) We all already know Open Wins, from Web 1.0. Well, we did, anyway - its just unevenly distributed in the early days, to paraphrase William Gibson.

(ii) We already knew that it was just a matter of time before the AOL 2.0 Wannabees woke up to find someone would play the Open Card 2.0

One assumes (of course) that Huber's Web as Platform is not just a Googleterm for "Google Closed Platform".

So, more like a Santayana moment then.....its sort of sad that all these closed platforms are trying to reinvent 1995, but c'est la vie I suppose.

(Though one benefit of the closed social nets is that they have forced the debate about privacy and data ownership forward quite a bit - probably unintentionally, of course)

Back to the Future!