Web2.0 is like the Centre Pompidou

Many of the things we now like to call web2.0 have been around for a long time. Dave Winer’s Manila-based blog scripting.com, for example, is in its 11th year. Blogger.com has been around since 1999. So-called user-generated content, as horrible as it sounds, as if we were doing nothing but creating the crap content necessary in old media for advertisers to advertise against, is not even a novelty of the online world – classified ads were printed on dead trees well before Craigslist. Many other things we take for new today were already there in the days of web1.0.

The Centre Pompidou is an art and research center designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano and British architect Richard Rogers in the Beaubourg area of the IVe arrondissement in Paris. One of the most striking features of the Centre Pompidou is that the architects decided to break with architectural conventions by moving functional elements such as escalators, water pipes and air conditioning tubes to the outside of the building, freeing up interior space for the display of art. And yes, the pipes are all color-coded: blue for air, green for water, and yellow for electricity.

So, here’s my point: if we don’t blind ourselves to the fact that Ebay had its feedback forum from the get-go and was a community well before if was a marketplace, that Amazon.com gave us not only e-commerce, but also consumer reviews and collaborative filtering, and that we had friends on ICQ and AIM and Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger – if not on sites that show us our network of friends and our friends’ networks, what we are doing today with web2.0 is turning everything inside-out, just like Piano and Rogers did with pipes and tubes at the Centre Pompidou.

There were social features back then, but they were in the background, or sometimes downright hidden, whereas today you see the social part up-front, and often in a very visual way such as a tagcloud. On Anobii, you see nothing but the social part, whereas on Amazon.com it’s just a feature. Some online newspapers pay lip-service to the fact that readers count and allow them to vote if they like an article or not – but usually don’t display the vote count, nor do they demote an article nobody likes, which instead is exactly what happens on social news sites such as Digg.

What’s more – and done better than Piano and Rogers could have ever done in the design of the Centre Pompidou – putting the tubes on the outside is not merely smart, colorful and pretty to see. With RSS, Yahoo! Pipes and APIs, it feels like the beautiful Beaubourg neighbourhood in Paris where this incredible building was landed thirty years ago had been invited to remake itself in the same fashion as the Centre Pompidou. And that is indeed some really good architecture.