Thursday, August 3, 2006

All Web 2.0, all the time: Over at Technology Review, in 'Homo Conexus,' James Fallows reports the results of a two-week experiment in which he cast off desktop software and cast his lot with a collection of Web-based ('Web 2.0') applications. [...] The Achilles heel is connectivity: For instance, he uses Writely to compose the article itself and, inevitably, his Net connection drops in the middle, forcing him to reconstruct his work from local backups that he'd cautiously been keeping. (Via Scott Rosenberg's Wordyard.) I wonder which alternative world these Web 2.0 advocates live in. Constant high-speed connectivity is not here, and I see no evidence that it will be here anytime soon. In the last couple of months, I've seen the following connectivity problems: Broken wireless authentication system at a hotel in Helsinki that blocked my laptop after the first access in any given 24-hour period. Poor T-Mobile EDGE coverage at Salt Lake city airport. Extortionate charges for 802.11 connectivity at London Heathrow. My T-Mobile HotSpot account does not work in Europe. My DSL ISP is getting out of the residential service business, and the new ISP is having a terrible time getting a working second line from the local loop monopoly. A colleague who used a Webmail service while traveling had his accounts hacked, presumably because the computer or connection he used were compromised. 9:48:05 AM