2.0No

Your honour, I plead guilty to the crime of Web 2.0 over-hype and the web professional’s circle-jerk of 2.0 trendiness. However, sir, I believe I can justify my offences…

Yeah, that’s right. I’m certainly guilty of the OMG WEB 2.0 LOL craze sweeping the world of Web design. I’ve preached the wonders of the semantic Web and how those out of the loop on the latest Web technologies are simply old-school. I’m not the only one doing so, though; web2.0 is a popular del.icio.us tag and a Technorati query reaches over 100,000 blog entries. We as Web professionals, enthusiasts, and users preach the glories of a real, democratic Web for the masses. We called it Web 2.0.

Tim O’Reilly takes the credit for first calling the trend Web 2.0: when he used the term, Web 2.0 conceptualised a semantic, socially-driven Web made with the latest authoring standards and technologies, with an emphasis upon the social control of the user. Somewhere in there, however, the community expanded the definition of Web 2.0: Web 2.0 means Ajax. Web 2.0 means Prototype. Web 2.0 means sans-serif and bright colours. Web 2.0 eventually reached the point to where you could only define it as whatever Web 1.0 - whatever that is - isn’t. Web 2.0 has such a broad meaning that it’s impossible to explain to someone not within the 2.0-sphere. And, for that matter, we can’t even seem to consistently define Web 2.0 for ourselves, else the definition wouldn’t be so broad. Web 2.0 is the Web designer’s Soylent Green. (Sadly, even though that’s supposed to be a statement of irony, you could easily argue that Web 2.0 is Soylent Green.)

As I browsed through my RSS feeds yesterday, I came across 2.0Culture on del.icio.us/popular. 2.0Culture is well on its way to becoming the new new buzzword. 2.0Culture is the new pink.

Virginia Postrel, a columnist for The New York Times, once wrote “The most successful innovations are the ones we stop noticing almost immediately.” I’m half-inclined to agree; instant messaging and e-mail, although hyped by the mainstream as “new” for a while, are rarely noticed as anything special today. People have adapted to them. LCD panels? Who actually thinks about them as something innovative over the CRT? The PDA/phone “smartphone” idea is commonplace. Even in our little technology sector, this statement proves itself.

We can see it with a few pieces of that Web 2.0 technological cornucopia: Ajax is used in plenty of places. Tags? No one pays much attention to them anymore; after all, it’s just a re-hash of the keyword concept. However, the whole Web 2.0 package, that thing described as 2.0Culture by Roman Mittermayr, is quickly becoming the garish fashion-whore of the Web industry, even though a few of its underlying technologies are innovative. It’s still just as hyped as it was in the beginning, and it’s reaching a point at which it should’ve died for something else.

In an interview with Khoi Vinh of Subtraction fame last week (which I’ll post in its entirety once I wrap it all up with him,) he brought up an interesting point:

I have nothing against [Web 2.0], really. I don’t find it objectionable in the least, though I think it’s just a developmental phase that won’t be remembered in and of itself unless some really stellar designs are produced…

While I think he’s being slightly radical, Vinh has a point: will we even remember Web 2.0 in 2007, or will we be on Web 3.0? For that matter, why are we still so infatuated with Web 2.0? Our constant self-praise of what Web 2.0 has accomplished (or has yet to accomplish) is, in essence, counter-productive. Why are we infinitely re-defining a trend to fit our individual social visions?

The questions don’t end there. Why can’t we just let Web 2.0 die and cannibalise the things we’ve learned from the hype? Are we praising Web 2.0 all the time simply to keep it relevant? Do we really need some elitist trend within our circle? Most of all, is Web 2.0 and whatever-you-wish-to-define-it-as even necessary for those of us that know and use its beneficial technology? Web 2.0 was a cool buzzword when the social Web ideas were new. We as professionals know these ideas and how to implement them using the trend’s technologies. Web 2.0, therefore, has been assimilated into the very way we do work. It’s no longer new. Preaching of Web 2.0 as an enigmatic technological trend isn’t only counter-intuitive; it’s outright regressive.

Now that we know about the cool technology, it’s time to stop our intra-industry circle-jerk and focus more on the common use of this technology. It’s silly to apply this stuff because it’s trendy; so many “Web 2.0″ applications use such a ridiculous helping of Ajax/tags/whatever-else-you-want-to-say-is-Web-two-point-oh that the UI becomes, well, useless. Do we really need to mashup that cool Web 2.0 mashup, which really just glorified Flickr? No. Do we really need individual blogs to have Web 2.0 APIs? Certainly not. Do we need to tag Amazon.com items? No; the site was plenty powerful without this supposedly revolutionary technology. Just because we think Ajax, tags, Fisher-Price buttons, Helvetica, Georgia, and other elements are amazingly hip doesn’t mean we should smash them all uselessly into every site we build. There is a point to where all of this ends up on the downward-sloping side of a usability bell curve, and it’s easy to get carried away in the chaos of trendiness.

Certainly, hyping the trendiness to those out of the loop may, in fact, be productive. Within the circle, though, hyping the hype isn’t really getting us anywhere. Creating new buzzwords like 2.0Culture isn’t getting us anywhere. Unless preaching the hype is really going to push us forward, we’re wasting time.

And, for that matter, let’s stop wasting time. Let’s take what we know and use it to build better websites. Talking about what Web 2.0 is or making it into a quasi-religious practise doesn’t advance our websites or even what Web 2.0 is supposed to stand for anyway. Let’s use what we learned in 2005, and, eventually, we’ll make a new set of trendy tech. After all, what it’s called doesn’t matter; what the user’s experience is does. Are we forgetting why we started using Ajax to begin with? Get back to the basics, friends. Just because the SOP now includes DOM scripting and XMLHttpRequest doesn’t mean we should still be shocked. Just say no to 2.0: we’re beyond that.