Happy birthday WWW

The World Wide Web celebrated 25 years on 12 March – although that’s really 25 years since conception rather than since birth. It was on the 12 March 1989 that Sir Tim Berners-Lee first put forward his proposal for what became the World-Wide Web.

The 34-year-old software engineer at CERN physics lab in in Geneva wrote a paper called, “Information Management: A Proposal”. The driving force was the need to not only communicate with colleagues, but also keep in contact with the many scientists who had worked at CERN and were now working elsewhere.

It soon became clear that the idea could be extended beyond CERN and in 1990, working with Robert Cailliau, proposed to use hypertext. The first Web site was created that year. Their thinking at the time was that there would be a web (the WorldWideWeb) of hypertext documents, and people could view them using a browser.

Steve Jobs is strangely linked to this story, and that’s because the first server was a NeXT Computer. These workstations were built by Jobs and his team, which included other ex-Macintosh staff. There was actually a note on the computer telling people not to turn it off. By late 1991, people outside CERN could access the Web as a service available on the Internet. By 1992, there was a server outside of Europe. It was set up in Palo Alto at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

What Berners-Lee did that was special was to combine hypertext and the Internet. He also developed three technologies that we take for granted nowadays. They are: Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP); Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML); and unique Web addresses – URLs (Uniform Resource Locators).

In 1993 the Web browser called Mosaic was released. This had a graphical user interface and made browsing the Web easy and quick. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded in 1994. The rest, as they say, is history.

Using the 25th birthday as a springboard, Sir Tim Berners-Lee has called for a bill of rights to protect freedom of speech on the Internet and users’ rights following leaks about government surveillance of online activity. Berners-Lee has said that there is a need for a charter like the Magna Carta to help guarantee fundamental principles.

Edward Snowden’s leaking of so many documents revealing (or confirming) that governments all over the world are monitoring Internet activity (as well phones) has brought Web privacy to the attention of the public. It seems that the NSA has been collecting personal data about Google, Facebook, and Skype users.

And now we can use the Web on our tablets and smartphones. We can buy just about anything from Amazon. We can look-up everything on Google, find out the details on Wikipedia, keep up with our friends on Facebook, watch videos on YouTube, shop, bank, and choose the best deals for insurance. We can send e-mails, and tweet about what we’re doing and who we’re with. We can also apply for a job, listen to music, read a book, and browse photos. In fact, we can do just about anything it’s possible to do.

It’s true that there is a dark side to the Web. People can find out a lot of information about you from a quick online search, and organizations, many of which are part of the government, can find out even more about your browsing habits etc. But on the whole, for most people, getting online is a natural part of the day – and it’s a very enjoyable part of their day. So well done TimBL, great idea. And happy birthday to the World Wide Web.

Web 3.0 and Facebook

Keen as I am on selling my company’s services to help other organizations make the best use of social media, I never thought that I would be focusing a blog on our old friend Facebook. And yet, this week’s announcements at the F8 developer conference seem to have taken Facebook out of the ‘me-too’ duel with Google plus and Twitter and, in a quantum leap, put it way ahead of the game. Bringing Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of a Semantic Web closer.

Facebook recently allowed us to separate our real friend from our ‘Facebook friends’ in a similar way to Google plus’s circles. Then they gave us the ‘Subscribe’ button, allowing us to filter what we read. We can subscribe to ‘all’ updates, ‘most’ updates, or ‘only important’ updates rather than get news of all the goings on of our friends. But then – like Twitter – you can subscribe to people you don’t even know, following their statuses and profile updates. Interesting, but, in many ways, underwhelming. Then they announced Timeline, which is a replacement for the current profile page. And then the big one – Open Graph.

Open Graph (a new class of app) will apparently enable Facebook users to share experiences in realtime. Users will be able to instantly share activities with their friends without being required to grant apps permission each time. The more business-oriented amongst you will realize that Facebook users will be sharing more data with friends, so with Graph Targeting the marketing people will be able to deliver specific marketing messages to the ideal target market.

But, apart from Mark Zuckerberg getting even more shedloads of money, this announcement moves us a step closer to the Semantic Web – or Web 3.0 as it’s sometimes called. Way back in 1999 Tim Berners-Lee said: “I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analysing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy ,and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.”

The Semantic Web will, in many ways be computer driven rather than human driven, and will integrate information from many different sources. This is dependant on meta data being avilable – and in many ways, this is what will happen with Facebook’s new approach.

We can turn our Web pages into graph objects using the Open Graph protocol tags and the familiar Facebook Like button on those Web pages. The tags look like:



In addition to the Open Graph protocol’s four required properties:

• og:title –t he title of the object as it should appear within the graph, eg a film title.
• og:type – the type of your object, eg "movie".
• og:image – an image URL, which should represent the object within the graph.
• og:url – the canonical URL of tha object that will be used as its permanent ID in the graph, eg http://www.itech-ed.com/blog000.htm.

Facebook has added:
 

• fb:app_id – a Facebook Platform application ID that administers this page.

And recommends using: 

• og:site_name – a human-readable name for your site.
• og:description – a one to two sentence description of your page.

When a user ‘likes’ a Web page using a Like button, a News Feed story is published to Facebook.

Wikipedia suggests that: “There are some who claim that Web 3.0 will be more application-based and centre its efforts towards more graphically-capable environments .” This is what Facebook’s Open Graph appears to be.

It also seems that some companies, such as those providing music streaming services, video streaming services, and newspapers will be able to customize the ‘Like’ button to say ‘listen’, ‘watch’, or ‘read’, as appropriate. Then, once someone has shared the content using these new buttons, other Facebook users will be able to access the content within Facebook provided the content supplier has created a compatible Facebook app.

Mainframers probably already know that IMS has a page at www.facebook.com/IMSFans, and CICS has a page at www.facebook.com/pages/CICS/133227520048745. You might not know that the Virtual IMS user group has a page at www.facebook.com/pages/Virtual-IMS-user-group/282385116069, and the Virtual CICS user group has a page at www.facebook.com/pages/Virtual-CICS-user-group/163022600420053.

Interesting times for Facebook and definitely putting some distance between it and its nearest rivals – for a while.