Friday, October 21, 2005

Joel on Web 2.0

I love Joel Spolsky's rant on the Web 2.0 buzzword:
The term Web 2.0 particularly bugs me. It's not a real concept. It has no meaning. It's a big, vague, nebulous cloud of pure architectural nothingness. When people use the term Web 2.0, I always feel a little bit stupider for the rest of the day.

Not only that, the very 2.0 in Web 2.0 seems carefully crafted as a way to denigrate the clueless "Web 1.0" idiots, poor children, in the same way the first round of teenagers starting dotcoms in 1999 dissed their elders with the decade's mantra, "They just don't get it!"
"A big, vague, nebulous cloud of pure architectural nothingness." Heh, heh.

But Joel is right. Technocrats can't even define the term "Web 2.0". That puts it firmly in the meaningless buzzword camp.

Update: Dare Obasanjo also flips the bozo bit on Web 2.0. He says, "The 'web 2.0' meme isn't about technology or people, it's about money and hype."

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The media/vc/marketing types have taken over the term web 2.0 and are milking it,
developers are wondering "what the heck is all this fuss about silly drag-and-drop a.k.a ajax?"

Greg Linden said...

I agree that O'Reilly's definition is elaborate, but not that it is well defined.

That attempt at a definition is five pages long and ends not with a simple and concise definition, but with a list of characteristics that Web 2.0 companies tend to have.

Tim recognized this and tried to come up with a more compact definition, but the shorter version is still awkward and unclear.

By the way, for an cute take on the ambiguity of the "Web 2.0" term, take a peek at Web 2.0 or not?. Very amusing.

Anonymous said...

sounds like joel is describing joel, actually... he's basically 20% ego driven broadsides, 70% generalities and 10% incorrect or inapplicable information.