Firas Durri: Enthusiast

Are you sick of people spouting rah-rah nonsense about ‘Web 2.0′? So is Michael Heilemann:

Screw you guys, I’m already onto building Web 3.0! HAH! In other words: I’m unsubscribing from all feeds that use the term ‘Web 2.0′ in more than one entry a month! I’m sick of hearing about Web 2.0!

Bah, Michael is just behind the times. He’s like the Catholic Church irritated about Galileo. Personally, I’m all for Web 2.0, being the Chief Financial Officer for a hot new company—p.et/s—that Dr. Dave just unveiled:

This time around, we’ll be using AJAX and RSS technologies. You won’t have to reload a single page to order your dog food. Just. Brilliant.

Please send your contributions to the first round of funding via Paypal.

We’ll tag the food by taste and brand name, and then map the tags using variable font size! We’ll integrate with Flickr, so in return for a picture of your cat, you get virtual money spendable anywhere our proprietary currency is supported! I get to sip champagne on charactered jets while flying across the world on ‘crucial business trips’! All employees get paid in stock options! What’s not to like? Join us in irrational exuberance, it’s Web 2.0, after all!

Gah! Even the rants are about Web 2.0 now! —Joey Brooks

I know people are sick of hearing stuff like ‘Ajax’, but at least it’s a legitimate descriptor for a certain application of technology. Even fuzzy stuff like ‘The Long Tail’ means something. ‘Web 2.0′ means nothing; the phrase is useless. Unless you were aching in search of a marketing term to obscure your technology offering, hoping to bluff your way into taking a huge unredeemable investment, itching to revel in the aforementioned bubble scenario.

Somewhere along the line people forgot that Flickr, del.ico.us etc. are just good software, not heralders of a revolution. For example, tags are just keywords; they won’t solve all your problems. You can’t package a handful of design patterns into a ‘oh my god, technology revolution!’ concept and expect to deliver it with a straight face. Wait—apparently you can, and have bunches of people buy in, hook, line and sinker. But I suppose you can’t fault software geeks for having their eyes light up upon noticing ‘DotCom Bubble, Reloaded’ coming their way.

Here’s a ‘meme map‘ for Web 2.0.

The meme map is visual indication that “Web 2.0″ has joined “SOA” as a buzzword that is too ill-defined to have a serious technical discussion about. It is now associated with every hip trend on the Web. Social Networking? That’s Web 2.0. Websites with APIs? That’s Web 2.0. The Long Tail? That’s Web 2.0. AJAX? That’s Web 2.0. Tagging and Folksonomies? That’s Web 2.0 too. Even blogging? Yep, Web 2.0.

I think the idea and trend towards the ‘Web as a platform’ is an important one and I find it unfortunate that the discussion is being muddied by hypesters who are trying to fill seats in conference rooms and sell books.
—Dare Obasanjo

By the way, why are they specifying it to a tenth of precision if they can’t decide what it means?

What’s my point here? Simple: don’t say “Web 2.0″. It makes you sound clueless. Do you want to sound clueless? You wouldn’t say things like “vertically integrated solution leveragance” or “synergetic paradigm shift”, now would you? Web 2.0 belongs in the same category—phrases enunciated by gaping idiots to signify that they don’t have anything particular to say.

Dare identifies some common points of the phenomenon referred to as Web 2.0: having an API, taking advantage of collective intelligence, harnessing the long tail. Notice that they’re absolutely independent of each other: Google and Amazon implement all three; UrbanDictionary uses mainly the second; Rhapsody, just the last. Determine which concept you wish to talk about, and say exactly that. Do not be a dolt—don’t say ‘Web 2.0′! Refer to ‘the emerging web’ if you absolutely must.

In any case, what staid, sedate person would run a released, versioned iteration of the web anyway? Web Unstable for life!