The Marshal

In Web 2.0 and Tim O'Reilly as Marshal Tito Bill Thompson complains about Web 2.0, AJAX and the like obstructing a passage to the real distributed web:

Now we must decide whether to put our faith in Ajaxified snakeoil or to look beyond the interface to distributed systems, scalable solutions and a network architecture that will support the needs and aspirations of the next five billion users.

And Tim O'Reilly as Marshal Tito steering this:

Fortunately, O’Reilly seems less of a psychopath than Mao or Stalin, and is perhaps closer to the pragmatic Yugoslavian leader Marshal Tito, who carefully steered a path between the USSR and the West for decades.

I must admit it's hard for me too conceive how the Marshal steers the process. This is my best guess.

If you want a more serious comment about Bills post see Nicholas Carr, Dan Farber or Shelley Powers.

Bill Thompson fears that we may miss the brave new world by focussing on the 2.0 stuff:

If we sort out our interfaces and interactions we can may even be able to put our heads into the screen, be part of the metaverse, enter cyberspace and interact fully and equally with agents, people, sims and any other machine- or human-generated intelligence. But this will not happen if we follow the Web 2.0 fantasy and put our trust in cool but ultimately shallow tricks with the presentation of data. The time has come to stand up and be counted, and we need people who can count in hex and see beyond the Web 2.0 hype.

Maybe we have to go through applications to make progress, even 2.0 applications.