Web 2.0 to you too, buddy
So I'm watching all this Web 2.0 nonsense go flying through my aggregator. The whole while, I can only think of one thing: we can fling around pithy sayings all we like, or talk about social software (what an overblown buzzword that is), or go ahead and declare Ajax the savior of humanity and the web, but we need to remember one thing: those of us who give a damn might be 20% of the web's users, tops. And that's a generous margin.
An anecdote: have you ever tried to explain to your mom or a coworker what del.icio.us actually is? "Social bookmarking" just gets you the deer-in-the-headlights look from most people. Saying "it's a site where you can categorize and bookmark sites" just gets "oh, but I can do that in Firefox." (Yes, my mom uses Firefox. I'm proud of her.) And yet, del.icio.us is heralded as one of the precursors of Web 2.0.
Oh, what's that? It's not anymore? Because it doesn't use Ajax? Oops, my bad.
So from what I can gather, Web 2.0 is:
- not really worth worrying about, as long as we write software that gets it, or
- made of people, or
- RSS 2.0, or
- the web as platform, relinquishing of control, setting the data free, and a number of other things that manage to simultaneously puzzle and worry, or
- a philosophy of building applications, or
- a conference for a bunch of people who think they know what Web 2.0 is to rub elbows with other people who think they know what Web 2.0 is, or
- any number of other vague, horribly-dot-com-bubble-like definitions.
I find myself agreeing more and more with Dave with each time I read the phrase "Web 2.0" (maybe I'm just getting cynical):
The Web is real. The Semantic Web is an idea and Web 2.0 is a marketing concept used by venture capitalists and conference promoters to try to call another bubble into existence.
The hype is treating "Web 2.0" as more and more real, and the hypesters are getting further and further out on a limb.
Web 2.0 is P2P, only worse. P2P at least referred to something identifiable, even if its P2P-ness wasn't the point.
Maybe we should've figured out what Web 1.0 was/is, first, because I'm pretty sure Web 2.0 just means building useful things that are built to flip, and I'm not so sure that's a great thing to base a (point revision || revolution) on.