MCP is the coming of Web 2.0 2.0

Summary

Over the last few months, all the nerds have gotten excited about Model Context Protocol, or MCP. It's a spec that was designed by Anthropic (the Claude folks) last year to let their LLM know how to ask various apps for information or be able to interact with different systems. Then, a couple months ago, OpenAI decided to support the same protocol in ChatGPT, and voila! Now it's a standard that everybody has adopted. It's even in Windows, the official operating system of the late 20th century. The interesting thing about the rapid adoption of MCP isn't the specification itself. Honestly, the spec is... kinda mid. Compared to the olden days, when specs were written by pedantic old Unix dudes who were never in danger of being gruntled in the first place, they would be scratched out in plain text, with the occasional shouting in ALL CAPS about what we SHOULD and MUST do. MCP is very nearly just a vague set of ideas, a hallucination of a specification, appropriate to the current era, where even the constitution is just a suggestion. A ~~ vibe protocol ~~. But MCP works! And it's open — and that's what counts. The Real, Open Web In the real world, on the real web, slightly under-specified protocols that quickly get adopted by all the players in a space are what wins; it's how we got to the beautiful, radical magic of things like "wherever you get your podcasts". This is why the rapid adoption of MCP represents something of a second coming of the ethos of Web 2.0. Maybe we can call it Web 2.0 2.0. It is important to understand that the current usage of "Web 2.0" is often wrong; people often use Web 2.0 as a term to describe things like Facebook. This is incorrect — closed, proprietary, user-hostile sites like Facebook are what killed Web 2.0. The Web 2.0 community was a bunch of folks building lots of different sites that were meant to have open APIs that let developers (and even users!) explore and connect people and data together in interesting and unexpected and useful...