Geez. I've had it up to here with this Web 2.0 stuff. I mean, not the actual stuff- I'm a big fan of cool technology (like Ajax) and cool business philosophy (social software/culture of participation)- but rather the faddishness of it all. We are turning very positive trends in the Internet into the technological equivalents of parachute pants and Ricky Martin.
Tim O'Reilly, one of the biggest evangelists of the 2.0 movement, posted this as his compact (!) definition of Web 2.0:
Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an "architecture of participation," and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.
Seriously? I know that Mr. O'Reilly has more grassroots Web street cred in his little finger than most of us could ever hope to get in our lifetimes, but really. If you throw the words "scalable and robust" into that monster, you'll have yourself a vortex of double-speak the likes of which would make even the most 1.0 of web marketing professionals blush. We may be trying too hard here.
Even Venture Capitalists, a group of people much maligned for following trends like a pack of 14 year-old girls, are getting sick of it. Mr. Segal, one of the aforementioned VC's, very accurately calls the Web 2.0 hype as he smells it:
Content Management is Web 1.0 while Wikis are Web 2.0. Gimmie a break. Wikis ARE content management dressed up a web service on top of a database engine that tracks content and, wait for it, changes to that content, in other words: Content management.
We might be just a little too close to this both temporally and emotionally right now to claim adequate perspective on how we define this putative revolution. And I wonder if, when all the dust settles, and we've separated the theory from the real applications, we'll come to learn that we've just barely hit Web 1.1.
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