The average user doesn’t necessarily care about wireless access. Not having to install anything is a big benefit for some users. Casual access from other wired sites is another – checking mail from work or a friend’s house for example. And of course some applications are naturals for the medium – photo galleries, for example, where sharing with family and friends is a fairly ubiquitous desire.

I think you underestimate the availability of network access in some areas as well, and erroneously think it needs to be free. Data access from wireless phone carriers is becoming a common bundle, and browsers on phones are becoming increasingly capable (expect the iPhone to spur other manufacturers to focus on this area).

You also mention latency on GPRS, which is certainly painful, but basing the viability of wireless applications on a dated network standard is fatuous. Deployments of 3G networks are well under way in a lot of countries. I’ve been enjoying an EV-DO connection with latency typically in the 150-200ms range for years, with very few coverage problems in any of the areas I typically travel. And more complex applications are getting increasingly smart about latency masking techniques (including full off-line operation in some cases).

Even relying on wi-fi is hardly infeasible in a lot of cases. I see very few hotels or even cheap motels which don’t offer wireless internet access here in the United States and an increasing number of popular chains are offering wireless access. I can think of at least three within walking distance of my house.

Relying on internet access for music might not work for everyone (and I’d hardly recommend it as the only option) but that’s actually how I access my music most of the time – simple little ruby script on my server that transcodes flac to ogg overe http.

I’ve also speculated whether the wireless carriers here – Verizon in particular – might enter into competition with terrestrial and satelite radio providers. They already have a solid data infrastructure and they already provide media streaming to phones. To top it off GM is planning on putting their OnStar service – which includes an EV-DO radio – into every car starting in 2010.

Tbf not ‘currently’, because I’m back at my hotel. You see, I wanted to reply you while I was on a boat that was floating on the Bosphorus in Istanbul. Problem was that my connection was constantly failing.

Therefore I waited until I was back at my hotel where I have a wifi router that has ~5% quality in my room. You can probably imagine the ridiculous amounts of connection failures and latency that I’m having.

So yes, I’m going to share my photos with Tinne using a USB stick, or maybe I will send them to her when I’m back in Belgium (where I have a Internet backbone sticked in my arse).

You see, perhaps some people do but I don’t want to waste my tourism-time on waiting for flaky connections. Nor do I want to pay more than the price of 80 cocktails for GPRS AND wait for flaky connections to send,for example, photos to Flickr.

So your example, of photosharing, is currently completely failing for me. Yet I have plenty of money to buy myself really expensive, shiny camera’s, Internet connections, USB sticks.

I think if I would send a USB stick by postal mail to Tinne, that the photos would arrive sooner than if I’d try any of the Internet options that I have here. I actually seriously think that that would be a better option, indeed. No really.

So basically … all Web 2.0 use-cases are failing for me. Right here, right now.

You must know that I’m an expert computer software developer, who earns a living in Europe with it. You can assume that I ought to know how to get on the Internet. That I’m one of those people who ‘know’ about all this modern stuff. So it’s not that I’m a moron why I don’t have these options.

It’s really that they are simply not available. And Istanbul has relatively good Internet access.

You tell me how non-computer experts who are in my situation (a tourist in a big city) are going to seriously consume a web 2.0 application. And I mean “seriously”. Not the “once this week at the hotel” – answer, please. That doesn’t count and that’s just for checking E-mail (if even that worked out for this normal person).

I don’t see it. I really don’t.

SO. Web 2.0: fail, fail, fail and fail.

But that one mobile device that I carry around all the times, my cellphone, wow .. I have used that one often successfully here in Istanbul.

SO, mobile: success, success and success

Web x.x applications are not only useful when you have a wireless internet connection. In a vast majority they are useful for people with ANY kind of internet connection at speeds of at least 56 Kbps.

Yeah, that’s pretty low right? Well, I live in a, hmmm how they say… third world country?… and in this country the personal computer penetration is around 2.6% of the total population, and the internet penetration is around 2.0%.

So about 75% of people in this country with a personal computer has some kind of internet access at no less than 56Kbps speed. And guess what, most people don’t even know what IMAP, POP or even Outlook are but they use hotmail/yahoo/gmail. People use services like msn live spaces, flickr, or picasa to share photos. And surprisingly enough this is the number 1 country in facebook usage in latin america.

Sure, wireless connections are very scarse. This is not japan, but who needs to play last.fm in their car when you can put all the music you want on an mp3 cd or your mp3 player? And google maps? who need maps in a country where their city’s streets are not mapped to gps and almost no one has a car with gps either.

Nevertheless, I use Last.fm at home all the time with no buffering or connection issues, watch youtube videos to procrastinate, and browse through google maps or google earth just for fun :-D

So, is the future of web apps bound the state of wireless networks? Completely not.

Should I be called a web fan baby? I don’t think so, since I recognize de value of stand alone applications where they beat web based ones. For example I think there is a long long road ahead for google docs to beat microsoft office at least in usage statistics.

Should you be called a standalone fan baby? Well, I’m pretty sure of that ;-)

Before those Web 2.0 fanbois can show me 10-50x performance boost, and build their OMGWTFBBQ applications without breaking basic functionality like browser back button, they can sod off.

Furthermore I see daily cases where some plain retard web “developer” substituted stuff like tag with 100 lines of javascript. It makes me want to find out the address of the person who made it and pay him a visit… There are good spots for using all that fancy new stuff, but most of the fanbois don’t realize that it should be used extremely reluctantly.

In parallel can those web 2.something guys continue trying very hard to solve problems that require a economic model (a free yet reliable wireless Internet connection on the entire planet) that is not solvable for at least a few more generations.

I seriously wonder how any company is going to set this model up. Although once this would be set up, that company would probably be the world’s most powerful entity in the world (having control over ALL people’s Internet traffic in a world where a majority of typical problems are solved by computing devices. Wow).

However interesting that would be, it would introduce political problems too.

And however interesting that would be, the technical challenge and the energy/power required to achieve this (with today’s wireless standards) would probably require a few thousand nuclear power plants, millions of wifi access points and thousands of people being paid almost nothing for maintaining all those devices constantly.

I just don’t think it’s “doable”, given the speed of wifi innovations that I have seen for the last five years, within three or four generations.

Which basically means that I better don’t care about it too much: I will be death before THAT solution is in place.

And most current powerful and ultra rich people who are alive today and who could make this happen, would be death too. So there’s no profits for them personally.

Reality … is an interesting thing, sometimes, dear Web 2.0 fan babies.

Maybe people called Philip have an extra sense for reality, and is that the thing, Philip? :-)

Web applications do suck. Someone[tm] should fork Web 0.9. I’ve been saying that for a while. :-o Must be a Philip thing. ;-)