Web 2.0 Sucks
Whenever I hear the word “Web 2.0“, I can feel my hackles rise.
It is the most inspid, empty buzzword to which I’ve been subjected for a long, long time. I think the main reason it annoys me is the conflation of two nearly orthogonal technology developments into a single meme by a bunch of vapid digirati pundits. They seem to have convinced themselves that “THE INTERNETS ARE ON A WHOEL NOO PLANE” and promptly write dozens of the particularly nauseating sort of technology “news” puff pieces that somehow remind me of a skinny latte with saccharine vanilla syrup — annoying, expensive, calorie-free, and completely missing the point.
We have two cool things happening right now in web technology, which are each the result of a convergence of multiple trends.
- Companies that provide services on the internet (like photo hosting, web search, and product reviews) are letting other companies expose these services.
This is happening because:
- The dot-com bust is far enough in the murky past that companies are brave enough to try non-traditional business models again. Only this time, they’re doing them cautiously and correctly.
- There’s a standard, thanks to the W3C, for ways to expose and access these services.
- Internet Explorer has stagnated for the past couple of years at version 6. This is actually a good thing, because it means we’re starting to see convergence on a single set of browser features for a large proportion of Web users.
That’s all. That’s it. That’s “Web 2.0″. The hype is mainly due to a bunch of designers who have never done anything other than the web, and find their minds completely blown by the idea of multithreaded UI or service-based architectures. Which tells me that, perhaps, we ought to have a bit more computer science education beyond “Intro to Programming 101″ in the standard interaction design curricula.
