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Micah Wolfe
Every year (on and off the web) managers and investors catch a whiff of the broken-wind of the latest overused lingo and beseech their marketing departments to make the most of the latest “tickle me elmo” technologies (TMET) usually reducing them to easily remembered but equally meaningless acronyms (ERBEMA) in the hopes that, without any degree of understanding, they have happened to hop on board an emerging technology that will make them rich (or richer, as is usually the case).
Often, the most mundane and ridiculous garbage will spawn vast seas of followers that will somehow add legitimacy (and desireablility) to a product or service – Where do you keep your virtual pet’s corpse?
So why should the web be any different?
Ooooo! It’s web 2.0! (Must be something new!)
Ahhhh! AJAX! (Must be a new technology!)
Ugh!
Case in point, Flickr.
Don’t get me wrong. I like Flickr, I also like several other online photo galleries (WHICH IS ALL IT IS!!!). The problem? Tagging. Much like “Blogging” it’s significance has been VASTLY overstated. Go ahead and do a flickr search for something arbitrary like…earwax.
What do you get? half a dozen pictures of ear coning (okay that’s kind of relavent), two pictures of the substance in question (ick, very appropriate), and…? A lot of irrelevant pictures of unrelated people, places and things. Much like the concerns of Wikipedia’s critics about unfettered editing of articles (at least the Wiki articles get reviewed), the usability of “tags” depends on the intelligence and insight of those assigning them (anyone want to start uploading cow-girl pics of Madonna tagged with “pathetic hick wannabe” yet?).
Hype; however, is always good for making a buck, and that is what is driving Web 2.0. Vacuous lingo and meaningless hype.
The same tech (or similar tech with a bit of a face-lift) is still powering the same useless, dull crap (okay, I happen to like Ruby on Rails, but still haven’t had a need to utilize it for a client’s project—I actually wish I did).
In fact, the only bits of this article I take exception with are:
a.) Web 2.0 has almost nothing to do with DESIGN, and therefore will be of little interest to designers who will continue to use the same tools (or the latest ones from Adobe-macromedia-whomever-we-acquire-and-defile-next). It’s almost all about the back end. So a little wider perspective is necessary to see it’s real value (which is a lot less than the hype would indicate).
b.) Because of “a” and because nothing ever really changes; Jeffrey Zeldman’s statement that, “…and clients are more likely to request good (usable, well-designed) work instead of the usual schlock”. Is total crap. Clients DON’T request good, usable, well-designed work. They never have. They STILL want “Flash”, they just want a more secure and robust back-end (which web 2.0 (tho’ I would never refer to it as that) might actually be able to provide).
So whether it’s Web 2.0, AJAX, Mr. Clean, or whatever the latest newest brightest “thing” is; just remember it will be dictating the technologies, look and functionality of most of the sites we’re creating until the NEXT newest bestest thing “emerges”.
Just don’t get too riled when your next client asks you to use “the next Flash” to build an interface in the style that is “the next Aqua” and to stuff your own creative instincts. You can choose to laugh your way to the bank, or cry. It’s up to you.
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Derek Pennycuff
Is it sad that it’s becomming increasingly difficult for me to tell which sites are really trying to hype “Web 2.0” and which sites are simply a parody of the hype?
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TJ Nuckolls
All I have to say is thanks. I still find myself having to convince clients that building with web standards is a good idea, and frankly, I’m tired of it. I’ve now resorted at times to buying a copy of your book just for the first section and giving it to them as a gift for considering me.
But this article has just given me a boost. I’m not one of the brilliant designers who comes up with a million dollar idea, but I do care about my clients, their goals, and making sure as many people can learn about what they have to say as possible. So thanks for pumping that side of the business.
I love Flikr and the like, but while 90% of the sites out there are still crap, there’s still a whole lot of work to do, and frankly, I believe the information dispersed here, is worth more to the world than 10 Flickr’s.
So thanks for the article, and everything you do for the world. This site as been nothing less than a mentor to me, and I intend to pay it forward in every way I can. I hope all of the rest of you who read this site regularly are doing the same.
Where I work (non-agency), they’ve gotten all steamed up about AJAX. It takes just a day or two and all the developers are swooning over this (not-so) new technology, whether they’ve actually looked beyone the shiny packaging or not.
It’s taken me six months to get these same people to consider the benefits of putting a doctype in their HTML!
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Andrew Peace
Kudos to Zeldman for a great article and lots of great insight (and funny anecdotes).
As Padgett seems to be implying above, developers should concentrate on conforming to web standards before they try and jump on the AJAX bandwagon. The only reason that AJAX is ever a “bitch” to wire-frame is when your JavaScript doesn’t follow the correct DOM, or your markup doesn’t fit a standardized doctype.
Even Google doesn’t conform to standards—by far! Most of their sites don’t even have a doctype (gasp!). This holds true for almost all corporate or enterprise sites out there. AJAX is much easier to incorporate if you follow strict XHTML and the DOM.
And a side note—PHP and (especially) Ruby on Rails are never anything that Google, Yahoo, or any of the bigwigs would ever want to use. Most use Python as the back end, along with JavaScript and the DOM, of course.
I really hate these moronic “articles” about semantics, design, ethereal thoughts about position absolute and relative, accessibility is paramount but validation can suck my ass. I like the way you write, it makes a lot of sense and you don’t have googleads or whatever in the middle of your page, a lot of people have taken advantage of your influence, you need to make yourself clearer so to speak.
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Seth Steben
As a web design hobbyist with almost a decade of partially completed projects under my belt, I have jumped on a few bandwagons. Looking back, it seems that just as soon as I’d even begin to get the hang of something, it was time to drop it like yesterday’s soiled underwear and race on to the fresh virginal scent of tomorrow’s homecoming princess. Since I don’t get paid for web design, I have lost some of my early feelings of urgency to ‘keep on top,’ particularly since I began frequenting excellent resources like ALA a few years ago and discovered the joys of xhtml and css (along with the agony of a few hundred frustrating hacks for making IE work). I must say I am very glad to see web standards finally gaining some of the attention they deserve, even if that attention comes from fads or greed.
But I have another major interest, this one going back as long as I can remember, which has greatly matured and expanded over the past few years as well. I am a map geek. From the age of about 5, I could spend hours (later days) at a time simply spinning my globe, looking through atlases, poring over road maps, grabbing every last tourist brochure with any sort of map or location image at the ferry terminal, and even standing in the rain at a bus stop, memorizing the routes. Then I became a commercial fisherman and diver through most of my twenties, and I got hooked on nautical charts. So when I discovered GIS mapping (basically mapping databases) in the late 90’s, I knew this sort of thing would be in my future, at least as a hobby. I never have minded that people think I am strange for my map obsession. We all have our quirks, and that isn’t something that people are generally bothered or scared by. Although circumstances have prevented me from jumping headlong into GIS as I had hoped, I have plugged away at increasing my knowledge and skill in this fascinating field.
Then, in the past couple of years, the lid blew off. With Google Earth, now everybody thinks they like maps. Actually, they just like to ‘ZOOM,’ but that is a discussion for another forum. As a frequenter of the NASA WorldWind community forums and IRC channel (I write docs sometimes and help a little with tech support on occasion), it seems now that hardly a day goes by without a new development or bandwagon startup in this once comfortably geeky field. Now, when I hear the word AJAX, it makes me cringe to think of what new application somebody is going to come up with in one of my two main fields of interest, and how much further will I suddenly fall behind in the mad rush.
Sometimes I feel like Poe’s condemned prisoner lashed beneath the pendulumn as it slowly cuts deeper . . .
. . . At the very least, I miss my geekiness.
Thanks for the insightful article, and the last 5 years of consistently great reading (on my part).
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gabriel hase
First of all, thank you for this wonderful article! It’s really comforting to know that not everybody is on a plain hype cloud number 7. As a Web Developer I am also a little puzzled why people are pushing technologies that are up to 5 years old as the latest buzz and the Web 2.0 in general. But on a second glimps I have to say, it’s just marketing. It’s nothing special about it, it’s just that there is a little more money for web development than there was in the last 5 years and marketing guys are taking advantage of that.
So what can the tech guys do about it? As for me, be happy. The latest development on the web gives us much more possibilities to experiment and try to develop new application models. One example is social software, as done by flickr or del.icio.us. Let’s be honest, there wasn’t much interesting stuff hapening in the last 5 years, which you liked so much. We might have had the technologies (DHTML, flash, etc.) but nobody was willing to take the risk of trying something new. And the crowd of students doing our work (not quite professional but in a good-enough manner) at a price of a chinese sweat-shop worker wasn’t too comforting at all.
Web development seems to have a kind of up and down manner. Either hype or flop. As soon as a hype starts, the marketing guys get in and find some fancy words that sell (by the way the vocabulary on the 90’s hype wasn’t any better). From a technical perspective, why should we care? We can go and propose our engineering ideas and visions to the marketing guys and they will say: “oh yeah, we call this blabla. It’s the new bla.”, but whatever they call it, we can develop it, because there finally is the money and will for it. So this really is a cloud number 7 I like to be on and I am pretty sure that developers have had enough great ideas in the last 5 years which they finally want to go for.
So whatever web version we want to call it, let’s just say we don’t like marketing too much, but we gladly take their money to develop want we think the web needs (hey, finding something chilling and new is always kind of trial and error, for anything else humankind has proven just not to be smart enough). I like my field of work wheter it’s called web, web 2.0 or web.flop and I am looking forward to some great new applications out there!
By the way, for all technical guys on being ask what you do: just tell them you are a software engineer, then you’re neither seen with disgust nor adored, you’re just the good old nerd.
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feeder goldfish
Uh oh… get ready for Library 2.0. Lucky library-types like myself can gain fabulous insights from individuals who refer to themselves as “information mavens”. I suspect the Library 2.0 phenomenon will be just as irritating as Web 2.0. Don’t get me wrong. There are a lot of fine, fine web 2.0 apps out there and there are great ideas behind library 2.0. But, the smug hipster mentality drives me nuts. How do these librarians find the time to continually blog and comment on fellow hipster-librarian’s blogs? Don’t any of them work at public service desks? Manage staff? Catalog? Provide hands-on tech support? Manage online databases? Maybe my library is sadly underfunded. We do manage several library 2.0 type services, but just barely.
When I think of Web 2.0 Ajax is certainly part of the equation. But I think the hype pertaining to Web 2.0 is far more than about using javascript and the DOM to create pages that refresh inline. It is about community, commenting, tagging, and users creating a website versus a company creating it for them.
One example that comes to mind is google. Google has built this fantastic infrastructure around indexing the web. Still, if I want to search, say, Ajax or web design, I could be better off at Delicious. Delicious is just a platform and the community builds the product. Same with flickr, digg, technorati, etc.
I certainly share your disdain with a lot of the hype surrounding Web 2.0, but I think it is more than fancy inline forms! (BTW, this live preview is very cool!!)
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too bew
This site has a great user driven list: koolweb2.com
Best of Web 2.0 sites ranked by actual users. Drag & drop sites to desired spot in the list and submit rankings. Overall rankings reflect cumulative average of all user submissions. Recommend a new site as well..
I think is possible to respect some rights to the produced contain, but after some years, I think it will be more interest to show that to world .In this way that information could bring knowledge to some many people in so many country.
That is the main reason to defend this kind of projects
i couldn’t agree more. only until recently did i de-mystify the core piece that makes AJAX do what it does—and if someone had told me two years ago that all it was, is clever usage of XMLHttpRequest as yet another way to reduce the number of trips a client (browser) makes to the server, i would have started injecting it into nearly every application i’ve built from scratch in recent past.
as it were, the hype had me believing it was a far more complex thing than it really is, requiring coursework i, a mere freelancer, could not nearly afford.
Well said!
Like the great Mr. Zeldman I too loved the web for it’s own sake, distained the “irrational excuberance” of 1998-2001 as blind capitalist love held sway over our open source-based shareware/freeware-birthing world weird web. When the house of VC cards crumbled, relief came with a giant thud as my bank account bottomed out… and ideas flourished. Great things are afoot, yet, lest we have learned nothing, let not the money mongers steer the ship: do good webs—simple, clean, human and inspiring (like this site) and good will come… again and again. Else “meet the new boss same as the old boss.”
So what was that all about anyway. I did read the whole article, but by the time I got through 85 or so comments I forgot what hell it was about… oh that’s right, I was searching Google for “web 3.0”
Before AJAX, RoR and all this other ‘new’ stuff hit earth, I made up my mind and coined the times we experience right now the time of Self Publishing. Before, the web was a very technical thing only a few could master. Nowadays it takes you 2 minutes and an e-mail address to get a site going and start publishing.
THIS is what Web 2.0 is too me.
All the technical stuff, this ain’t Web 2.0. These are just tools. (And as the saying goes, a fool with a tool is still a fool.) Mighty tools, ok, but still they remain tools. Web 2.0 is not about the technology it is build with, but what the people can do using services created using these tools.
I know web geeks tend to see everything from a technical point of view. But that’s not enough. What is it that attracts thousand of people at Flickr or YouTube or myspace? They don’t give a damn about AJAX, JSON, XML, RoR and whatever fancy acronyms we geeks come up with. They care about content, about the possibilites they have.
Anyway. All this, even this discussion, ain’t new. It will pop up again and again when something ‘new’ hits earth.
I’d like to make one thing is absolutely clear right from the outset: Web 3.0 isn’t just about shopping, entertainment and search. It’s also going to deliver a new generation of business applications that will see business computing converge on the same fundamental on-demand architecture as consumer applications. So this is not something that’s of merely passing interest to those who work in enterprise IT. It will radically change the organizations where they work and their own career paths. I’ll write more on that in a later posting.
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dave halford
Take a look at an online storage service like IBackup (www.ibackup.com) that is a dominant player at this age of Web 2.0 boom. IBackup’s success shows that remote and online backups of even mission critical data will continue to grow despite all that have been written against the economic viability and data security concerns.
Besides regular backups and restores, IBackup’s flagship product IBackup for Windows (www.ibackup.com/ibwin_new.htm) allows regular scheduling of backups, multimedia streaming and file management. It also performs incremental and compressed backups that do not consume too much of your network bandwidth by transferring only portions of file that were changed. All backups are secure with the highest level of 128-bit SSL encryption on transmission.
The best thing I like about IBackup is IDrive (www.ibackup.com/IBDrive_new.htm) that maps my online account as a local drive on my computer. Sitting in front of my computer I can drag-and-drop, open, edit and save files in my online backup account. Operations using IDrive, which is a variation of network drive technology, enjoys 128-bit SSL support. IDrive can also be used to stream multimedia content using your favorite media player. It also supports concurrent operations for Access and other office applications.
IBackup lets you share data with both IBackup users and those who are not. For this you have to use Webmanager (www.ibackup.com/webmanager.htm). All you have to do is to create a few sharable links and then email these to your friends, partners and colleagues. The `Private Share’ feature allows an IBackup user to instantly share data with another IBackup user. Also view the data another user has privately shared with you. You can disable the `Private Share’ feature any time.
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Tony Eric
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95 Reader Comments
Back to the ArticleCliff Wells
… mean that I have to stop using tables to center things for IE?
Robin van Riel
Bwoy, for a minute there, I thought you were being serious :)
Michelangelo Iaffaldano
Dear Mr. Zeldman, A list Apart scored a measly 4 out of 42 on the “Web 2.0 validator”:http://web2.0validator.com – shame on you!
Micah Wolfe
Every year (on and off the web) managers and investors catch a whiff of the broken-wind of the latest overused lingo and beseech their marketing departments to make the most of the latest “tickle me elmo” technologies (TMET) usually reducing them to easily remembered but equally meaningless acronyms (ERBEMA) in the hopes that, without any degree of understanding, they have happened to hop on board an emerging technology that will make them rich (or richer, as is usually the case).
Often, the most mundane and ridiculous garbage will spawn vast seas of followers that will somehow add legitimacy (and desireablility) to a product or service – Where do you keep your virtual pet’s corpse?
So why should the web be any different?
Ooooo! It’s web 2.0! (Must be something new!)
Ahhhh! AJAX! (Must be a new technology!)
Ugh!
Case in point, Flickr.
Don’t get me wrong. I like Flickr, I also like several other online photo galleries (WHICH IS ALL IT IS!!!). The problem? Tagging. Much like “Blogging” it’s significance has been VASTLY overstated. Go ahead and do a flickr search for something arbitrary like…earwax.
What do you get? half a dozen pictures of ear coning (okay that’s kind of relavent), two pictures of the substance in question (ick, very appropriate), and…? A lot of irrelevant pictures of unrelated people, places and things. Much like the concerns of Wikipedia’s critics about unfettered editing of articles (at least the Wiki articles get reviewed), the usability of “tags” depends on the intelligence and insight of those assigning them (anyone want to start uploading cow-girl pics of Madonna tagged with “pathetic hick wannabe” yet?).
Hype; however, is always good for making a buck, and that is what is driving Web 2.0. Vacuous lingo and meaningless hype.
The same tech (or similar tech with a bit of a face-lift) is still powering the same useless, dull crap (okay, I happen to like Ruby on Rails, but still haven’t had a need to utilize it for a client’s project—I actually wish I did).
In fact, the only bits of this article I take exception with are:
a.) Web 2.0 has almost nothing to do with DESIGN, and therefore will be of little interest to designers who will continue to use the same tools (or the latest ones from Adobe-macromedia-whomever-we-acquire-and-defile-next). It’s almost all about the back end. So a little wider perspective is necessary to see it’s real value (which is a lot less than the hype would indicate).
b.) Because of “a” and because nothing ever really changes; Jeffrey Zeldman’s statement that, “…and clients are more likely to request good (usable, well-designed) work instead of the usual schlock”. Is total crap. Clients DON’T request good, usable, well-designed work. They never have. They STILL want “Flash”, they just want a more secure and robust back-end (which web 2.0 (tho’ I would never refer to it as that) might actually be able to provide).
So whether it’s Web 2.0, AJAX, Mr. Clean, or whatever the latest newest brightest “thing” is; just remember it will be dictating the technologies, look and functionality of most of the sites we’re creating until the NEXT newest bestest thing “emerges”.
Just don’t get too riled when your next client asks you to use “the next Flash” to build an interface in the style that is “the next Aqua” and to stuff your own creative instincts. You can choose to laugh your way to the bank, or cry. It’s up to you.
coelomic coelomic
Fantastic post. I would like to know how you created the image of the bottle in the beginning of the post.
Derek Pennycuff
Is it sad that it’s becomming increasingly difficult for me to tell which sites are really trying to hype “Web 2.0” and which sites are simply a parody of the hype?
Jeffrey Zeldman
The lovely “Kevin Cornell”:http://alistapart.com/about/kevincornell creates our illustrations.
TJ Nuckolls
All I have to say is thanks. I still find myself having to convince clients that building with web standards is a good idea, and frankly, I’m tired of it. I’ve now resorted at times to buying a copy of your book just for the first section and giving it to them as a gift for considering me.
But this article has just given me a boost. I’m not one of the brilliant designers who comes up with a million dollar idea, but I do care about my clients, their goals, and making sure as many people can learn about what they have to say as possible. So thanks for pumping that side of the business.
I love Flikr and the like, but while 90% of the sites out there are still crap, there’s still a whole lot of work to do, and frankly, I believe the information dispersed here, is worth more to the world than 10 Flickr’s.
So thanks for the article, and everything you do for the world. This site as been nothing less than a mentor to me, and I intend to pay it forward in every way I can. I hope all of the rest of you who read this site regularly are doing the same.
Alberto Romero
Hello,
Great article, Jeffrey. I have published a Spanish version of it on my blog: http://denegro.com/2006/01/web-30.html
I hope it’s useful for you to get to more people.
Vadim Gilead
What honorable Mr. Zeldman has laid out before us in this article is a hint as to how to be ahead of the rest in everything related to the Web.
By perceiving correctly the objective of Web’s existance we can understand how to develop it correctly thus being able to create great solutions.
Great solutions, in turn, bring money!
Mike Padgett
Thanks to Zeldman for a solid article.
Where I work (non-agency), they’ve gotten all steamed up about AJAX. It takes just a day or two and all the developers are swooning over this (not-so) new technology, whether they’ve actually looked beyone the shiny packaging or not.
It’s taken me six months to get these same people to consider the benefits of putting a doctype in their HTML!
Andrew Peace
Kudos to Zeldman for a great article and lots of great insight (and funny anecdotes).
As Padgett seems to be implying above, developers should concentrate on conforming to web standards before they try and jump on the AJAX bandwagon. The only reason that AJAX is ever a “bitch” to wire-frame is when your JavaScript doesn’t follow the correct DOM, or your markup doesn’t fit a standardized doctype.
Even Google doesn’t conform to standards—by far! Most of their sites don’t even have a doctype (gasp!). This holds true for almost all corporate or enterprise sites out there. AJAX is much easier to incorporate if you follow strict XHTML and the DOM.
And a side note—PHP and (especially) Ruby on Rails are never anything that Google, Yahoo, or any of the bigwigs would ever want to use. Most use Python as the back end, along with JavaScript and the DOM, of course.
Chrissy Weese
we love you, mr. zeldman.
Ricardo Carrasco
I really hate these moronic “articles” about semantics, design, ethereal thoughts about position absolute and relative, accessibility is paramount but validation can suck my ass. I like the way you write, it makes a lot of sense and you don’t have googleads or whatever in the middle of your page, a lot of people have taken advantage of your influence, you need to make yourself clearer so to speak.
Seth Steben
As a web design hobbyist with almost a decade of partially completed projects under my belt, I have jumped on a few bandwagons. Looking back, it seems that just as soon as I’d even begin to get the hang of something, it was time to drop it like yesterday’s soiled underwear and race on to the fresh virginal scent of tomorrow’s homecoming princess. Since I don’t get paid for web design, I have lost some of my early feelings of urgency to ‘keep on top,’ particularly since I began frequenting excellent resources like ALA a few years ago and discovered the joys of xhtml and css (along with the agony of a few hundred frustrating hacks for making IE work). I must say I am very glad to see web standards finally gaining some of the attention they deserve, even if that attention comes from fads or greed.
But I have another major interest, this one going back as long as I can remember, which has greatly matured and expanded over the past few years as well. I am a map geek. From the age of about 5, I could spend hours (later days) at a time simply spinning my globe, looking through atlases, poring over road maps, grabbing every last tourist brochure with any sort of map or location image at the ferry terminal, and even standing in the rain at a bus stop, memorizing the routes. Then I became a commercial fisherman and diver through most of my twenties, and I got hooked on nautical charts. So when I discovered GIS mapping (basically mapping databases) in the late 90’s, I knew this sort of thing would be in my future, at least as a hobby. I never have minded that people think I am strange for my map obsession. We all have our quirks, and that isn’t something that people are generally bothered or scared by. Although circumstances have prevented me from jumping headlong into GIS as I had hoped, I have plugged away at increasing my knowledge and skill in this fascinating field.
Then, in the past couple of years, the lid blew off. With Google Earth, now everybody thinks they like maps. Actually, they just like to ‘ZOOM,’ but that is a discussion for another forum. As a frequenter of the NASA WorldWind community forums and IRC channel (I write docs sometimes and help a little with tech support on occasion), it seems now that hardly a day goes by without a new development or bandwagon startup in this once comfortably geeky field. Now, when I hear the word AJAX, it makes me cringe to think of what new application somebody is going to come up with in one of my two main fields of interest, and how much further will I suddenly fall behind in the mad rush.
Sometimes I feel like Poe’s condemned prisoner lashed beneath the pendulumn as it slowly cuts deeper . . .
. . . At the very least, I miss my geekiness.Thanks for the insightful article, and the last 5 years of consistently great reading (on my part).
gabriel hase
First of all, thank you for this wonderful article! It’s really comforting to know that not everybody is on a plain hype cloud number 7. As a Web Developer I am also a little puzzled why people are pushing technologies that are up to 5 years old as the latest buzz and the Web 2.0 in general. But on a second glimps I have to say, it’s just marketing. It’s nothing special about it, it’s just that there is a little more money for web development than there was in the last 5 years and marketing guys are taking advantage of that.
So what can the tech guys do about it? As for me, be happy. The latest development on the web gives us much more possibilities to experiment and try to develop new application models. One example is social software, as done by flickr or del.icio.us. Let’s be honest, there wasn’t much interesting stuff hapening in the last 5 years, which you liked so much. We might have had the technologies (DHTML, flash, etc.) but nobody was willing to take the risk of trying something new. And the crowd of students doing our work (not quite professional but in a good-enough manner) at a price of a chinese sweat-shop worker wasn’t too comforting at all.
Web development seems to have a kind of up and down manner. Either hype or flop. As soon as a hype starts, the marketing guys get in and find some fancy words that sell (by the way the vocabulary on the 90’s hype wasn’t any better). From a technical perspective, why should we care? We can go and propose our engineering ideas and visions to the marketing guys and they will say: “oh yeah, we call this blabla. It’s the new bla.”, but whatever they call it, we can develop it, because there finally is the money and will for it. So this really is a cloud number 7 I like to be on and I am pretty sure that developers have had enough great ideas in the last 5 years which they finally want to go for.
So whatever web version we want to call it, let’s just say we don’t like marketing too much, but we gladly take their money to develop want we think the web needs (hey, finding something chilling and new is always kind of trial and error, for anything else humankind has proven just not to be smart enough). I like my field of work wheter it’s called web, web 2.0 or web.flop and I am looking forward to some great new applications out there!
By the way, for all technical guys on being ask what you do: just tell them you are a software engineer, then you’re neither seen with disgust nor adored, you’re just the good old nerd.
Eric Needle
excellent article.
Randy Cantrell
I am just rounding the corner to the finish line of WEB 0.5. At this pace, I’ll never catch up, or be hip! I’m getting too old for this crap.
feeder goldfish
Uh oh… get ready for Library 2.0. Lucky library-types like myself can gain fabulous insights from individuals who refer to themselves as “information mavens”. I suspect the Library 2.0 phenomenon will be just as irritating as Web 2.0. Don’t get me wrong. There are a lot of fine, fine web 2.0 apps out there and there are great ideas behind library 2.0. But, the smug hipster mentality drives me nuts. How do these librarians find the time to continually blog and comment on fellow hipster-librarian’s blogs? Don’t any of them work at public service desks? Manage staff? Catalog? Provide hands-on tech support? Manage online databases? Maybe my library is sadly underfunded. We do manage several library 2.0 type services, but just barely.
Gary Hussey
developing a wireframe for a flash app is also a pain.
Ashutosh Kadakia
Sweet, where can I sign up.
Hadley Stern
When I think of Web 2.0 Ajax is certainly part of the equation. But I think the hype pertaining to Web 2.0 is far more than about using javascript and the DOM to create pages that refresh inline. It is about community, commenting, tagging, and users creating a website versus a company creating it for them.
One example that comes to mind is google. Google has built this fantastic infrastructure around indexing the web. Still, if I want to search, say, Ajax or web design, I could be better off at Delicious. Delicious is just a platform and the community builds the product. Same with flickr, digg, technorati, etc.
I certainly share your disdain with a lot of the hype surrounding Web 2.0, but I think it is more than fancy inline forms! (BTW, this live preview is very cool!!)
Mr. Marquee
Thank you for saying what 89% of the Internet population is thinking. The other 11% are too busy doing bong hits.
too bew
This site has a great user driven list: koolweb2.com
Best of Web 2.0 sites ranked by actual users. Drag & drop sites to desired spot in the list and submit rankings. Overall rankings reflect cumulative average of all user submissions. Recommend a new site as well..
MKT WEB
I think is possible to respect some rights to the produced contain, but after some years, I think it will be more interest to show that to world .In this way that information could bring knowledge to some many people in so many country.
That is the main reason to defend this kind of projects
kris gale
i couldn’t agree more. only until recently did i de-mystify the core piece that makes AJAX do what it does—and if someone had told me two years ago that all it was, is clever usage of XMLHttpRequest as yet another way to reduce the number of trips a client (browser) makes to the server, i would have started injecting it into nearly every application i’ve built from scratch in recent past.
as it were, the hype had me believing it was a far more complex thing than it really is, requiring coursework i, a mere freelancer, could not nearly afford.
Termin Erinnerung
Hi! Thank you for these valuable informations…
Greetings from Germany
Sam.
Termin Erinnerung
Hi! Thank you for these valuable informations…
Greetings from Germany
Sam.
Michael Cummings
Well said!
Like the great Mr. Zeldman I too loved the web for it’s own sake, distained the “irrational excuberance” of 1998-2001 as blind capitalist love held sway over our open source-based shareware/freeware-birthing world weird web. When the house of VC cards crumbled, relief came with a giant thud as my bank account bottomed out… and ideas flourished. Great things are afoot, yet, lest we have learned nothing, let not the money mongers steer the ship: do good webs—simple, clean, human and inspiring (like this site) and good will come… again and again. Else “meet the new boss same as the old boss.”
Russell Savige
So what was that all about anyway. I did read the whole article, but by the time I got through 85 or so comments I forgot what hell it was about… oh that’s right, I was searching Google for “web 3.0”
Sascha Carlin
You can say that again, Jeffrey. Thank you.
Before AJAX, RoR and all this other ‘new’ stuff hit earth, I made up my mind and coined the times we experience right now the time of Self Publishing. Before, the web was a very technical thing only a few could master. Nowadays it takes you 2 minutes and an e-mail address to get a site going and start publishing.
THIS is what Web 2.0 is too me.
All the technical stuff, this ain’t Web 2.0. These are just tools. (And as the saying goes, a fool with a tool is still a fool.) Mighty tools, ok, but still they remain tools. Web 2.0 is not about the technology it is build with, but what the people can do using services created using these tools.
I know web geeks tend to see everything from a technical point of view. But that’s not enough. What is it that attracts thousand of people at Flickr or YouTube or myspace? They don’t give a damn about AJAX, JSON, XML, RoR and whatever fancy acronyms we geeks come up with. They care about content, about the possibilites they have.
Anyway. All this, even this discussion, ain’t new. It will pop up again and again when something ‘new’ hits earth.
Cone Tanriverdio
I’d like to make one thing is absolutely clear right from the outset: Web 3.0 isn’t just about shopping, entertainment and search. It’s also going to deliver a new generation of business applications that will see business computing converge on the same fundamental on-demand architecture as consumer applications. So this is not something that’s of merely passing interest to those who work in enterprise IT. It will radically change the organizations where they work and their own career paths. I’ll write more on that in a later posting.
rogerio kunkel
The best service about web 3.0: Colaboraty WebWin(http://www.colaboraty.com)
dave halford
Take a look at an online storage service like IBackup (www.ibackup.com) that is a dominant player at this age of Web 2.0 boom. IBackup’s success shows that remote and online backups of even mission critical data will continue to grow despite all that have been written against the economic viability and data security concerns.
Besides regular backups and restores, IBackup’s flagship product IBackup for Windows (www.ibackup.com/ibwin_new.htm) allows regular scheduling of backups, multimedia streaming and file management. It also performs incremental and compressed backups that do not consume too much of your network bandwidth by transferring only portions of file that were changed. All backups are secure with the highest level of 128-bit SSL encryption on transmission.
The best thing I like about IBackup is IDrive (www.ibackup.com/IBDrive_new.htm) that maps my online account as a local drive on my computer. Sitting in front of my computer I can drag-and-drop, open, edit and save files in my online backup account. Operations using IDrive, which is a variation of network drive technology, enjoys 128-bit SSL support. IDrive can also be used to stream multimedia content using your favorite media player. It also supports concurrent operations for Access and other office applications.
IBackup lets you share data with both IBackup users and those who are not. For this you have to use Webmanager (www.ibackup.com/webmanager.htm). All you have to do is to create a few sharable links and then email these to your friends, partners and colleagues. The `Private Share’ feature allows an IBackup user to instantly share data with another IBackup user. Also view the data another user has privately shared with you. You can disable the `Private Share’ feature any time.
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