Web 2.0 is less than just a buzzword

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Forgive me for my rambling, disorganised thoughts, but this has really been bugging me for a long time.

People are talking about "Web 2.0". Someone coins it (yes I found out who is responsible, but it doesn't really matter anymore). Then everyone talks about it. And still, nobody seems able to sum it up in a sentence.

Mind you, they probably couldn't sum up "Web 1.0" in a sentence either, without falling into the trap of self-referencing, e.g. "the older version of Web 2.0". Duh!

So, what does it mean? I think it's more geared towards collaboration than anything else. I doubt that would sum it up totally, hence the problem with doing a one sentence encapsulation of the beast, but hey...

Or have I just summed it up in a sentence? Really?

The problem is, the Web 2.0 term is totally hypocritical. It includes sites such as Gmail and Flickr, the sites that are in the eternal beta (I blogged about that a while ago - Beta has become meaningless). Those sites, much like the vast majority of web sites, do not use version numbers. I admit, I went through a phase of using them on my own sites... but they are best used for tangibles, especially software.

Web 2.0 implies that there is a big shift from one thing to the next. Well, on some levels, this isn't wrong. All that's really happening, though, is that more people are getting on board, and some really great services are emerging.

How is that different to any other point in the web's history? There is always new stuff; new sites, new ideas, new technology. If collaboration is the way forward, then that's great: but it's been around for a while, in the form of newsgroups, message boards, and instant messengers.

Apparently a wiki is the web 2.0 version of a CMS, with blogs replacing personal web sites. The problem for me is that there are lots of blogs that try to be web sites... and this is where a few things don't quite work.

Gone is the conventional navigation, and in come tags and searching. Great, you might think. But then you realise that due to the richness of these products, the number of tags and their weight will vary as a site grows. The same goes for search. It won't always yield the same results. So, what happens if you want to be sure that you'll find a page again?

Bookmarks. Of course. And therein lies the problem. With permalinks we are apparently encouraged to bookmark anything and everything. With a service such as del.icio.us we can do this... except, once again, the tagging and searching will not always yield the same results! So, as I add lots of links to a category, it becomes increasingly more difficult to find the ones I bookmarked ages ago.

I don't think it's wise to go from static (or indeed dynamic) web sites with all their navigation and the like, and take all that away in favour of blogs. A blog is great for one person, but it doesn't work so well for multiple contributors. OK, so a wiki is the way forward. Isn't that just another variant of CMS? Can it be called a completely different product? Possibly.

The issue I have with all this is that Web 2.0 claims to be much more of a revolutionary change than it actually is. A lot of this stuff has been around for years, it's just not gone mainstream. Is Web 2.0 when all of it goes mainstream? Are we going to end up commercialising the web in a similar way to when dance music goes from the underground to the overground, and loads of similar services clog everything else up? Flickr et al may be great, but the web as a community is becoming very fragmented, with blogs, photo sharing, message boards, hybrids... Where is the sense of unity?

recovered from my old LiveJournal account

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