The web is levelling
In a talk about how to make websites that are not primarily blogs with Wordpress at Geek Girl Meetup I had a short passage about how it’s so much easier to build a full-featured website or service today, because the web has levelled quite fast the last few years. Here’s a write-up of that thought since some people have been asking for it on Twitter.
Like a WoW character, the web as a whole is gaining more and more skills in the form of more and more abstracted services and libraries. First someone proves the concept of a new thing, like doing asynchronous requests for new content with JavaScript, or storing files in the cloud. Every part of each new thing is meticulously handcoded, but as soon as the concept and implementation make sense to enough people, someone wraps all the tedious stuff into a nice library, service or API.
With most of these tools being released open source, and some really strong communities popping up around them, the web ecosystem is fast gaining a lot of higher level building blocks. More and more things are becoming a one-click operation: the blog revolution started because it no longer took serious programming skills to set one up. Today you can get a shop, a social network, a blog, a video website, on demand computing power or storage and a number of other building blocks for a new idea that can be easily accessed through a couple of sign-up clicks or API calls.
So while the web 2.0 ecosystem started out as a stumbling n00b where each quest took lots and lots of detail work and you had to plow through slaying boars in the beginner zone for a serious amount of time and cost to get things up and running, today the web is more like a level 50 warrior who can just wander unhurt and untroubled through the basic quests ad get to the core of what’s new with an idea and start solving hard problems much faster since most of the plumbing is taken care of already.
