There was a lot to read about this week and I honestly don’t have the time or the inclination to write about everything I thought about, but I’m going to try to illustrate my main thoughts about the subject and then some other thoughts that I got sidetracked with.

Whenever anyone has said the phrase, “Web 2.0” I have immediately thought of that “connect to…” box every site has or wants to have with the little Facebook, Twitter, G+, etc. buttons in it. I have since realized that this was just a manifestation. The core of Web 2.0, in my eyes, is SaaS and treating the web as a platform. The latter seemed so obvious to me that I had never really thought about it until reading the article for class. I have used it as a platform. Even built a social networking application on it. But I had never explicitly thought about it as a platform, which I am now face-palming pretty hard over. I guess that is how thoroughly ingrained into our lives it is now though, that we don’t even think about it. We just share our experiences. Because that is what I think the core of Web 2.0 is about. Sharing your experiences through the web. And awesome things have come out of that. Communities form from those with shared interests and experiences. And that is by design. Those stronger companies and technologies that survived the dot com bubble burst did so because they emphasized user participation and accessibility.

I thought the “meme map” from the O’reilly Article really hit everything on the nose. One of the bubbles that stood out to me was “software that gets better the more people use it.” I am just really attracted to this as a concept. I love the idea of making programs that learn and grow. One of the coolest examples of this falls outside of the topic at hand, but I still think it’s cool as hell. It’s called Boxcar 2D, and you can watch this application generate a car from random vectors and random wheel placements and run them on a track. The ones that make it the farthest “mate” together and produce an offspring comprised of certain parts of the other car’s chromosome. At first the cars are pretty useless. Some don’t even have wheels. But as more and more data is collected, the cars start getting further and further down the track more consistently. It’s actually incredibly addicting to watch. I love the idea of things evolving like that. SO it’s cool to think of applications that grow in the same way, except the data that gets collected isn’t vectors and wheel placements, it’s people and experiences.

Another thing I thought was interesting from the meme map was the central tenant of users controlling their own data. I just thought it was kind of funny that the biggest sites like Facebook actually own and sell your data. How much of our data do we truly control? Another tenant was remixable data sources. Part of what makes Web 2.0 is being able to manipulate and augment other people’s data. I have a little trouble trying to reconcile the two.

I wish I had more time to tackle this stuff. Unfortunately the bulk of my time is going towards getting my first ever Android app off the ground. I might do some updates on that later. Let me know your thoughts on anything in the comments.