Web2.0

Everything You Never Wanted to Know About Web 2.0

a buzzword demystification zone
by inpheaux

"Web 2.0" is a relatively new meta-buzzword being used to try and wrap up all the web-related little buzzwords flying around right now into one single even-more-nebulous buzzword. It has two distinct aspects: technologies/concepts (some of which are actually good) and user base (most of which are drooling bandwagon-jumping people who think their blog Matters). Buzzwords are generally hard enough to decipher on their own, and Web 2.0 is a buzzword about other buzzwords, so the goal here is to try and explain this mess.

History Lesson

In recent years, some genuinely neat stuff has been finally coming to fruition out on the web. We've seen standards-based design finally take hold, there's been an explosion in the adoption of RSS and Atom feeds, content management systems like this wiki are all over the place and companies like Google are using technologies like AJAX to make sites like Google Maps and Gmail act like actual applications rather than clumsy websites. At the same time, blogs have become more and more pervasive, and the blogging community's hilariously over-inflated self-worth has been creeping towards critical mass.

Then, about a year and a half ago in a flash of twisted marketdrone brilliance, Dale Dougherty (VP of animal-book peddler O'Reilly) came up with a meta-buzzword to lump it all together: "Web 2.0". His basic idea was this - since the internet bubble burst, things on the internet have changed significantly due to the rise of blogs, new concepts about content distribution and organization, and new technologies like AJAX. Because of this, he felt this shift deserved a big important sounding title, like "Web 2.0".

What's with the Web 2.0 backlash?

You may have noticed that some goons don't really buy this whole Web 2.0 thing. I can't speak for everyone, but I think it's a combination of a lot of us being jaded veterans of the last bubble, a general distrust for buzzword-heavy marketspeak, and a massive hatred for vapid blogging trendwhores. Personally, I love most of the technologies that were lumped into the whole Web 2.0 term, but absolutely can't stand the overly self-important blog side of the equation. Most of the people I see trying desperately to push the importance of "Web 2.0" are bloggers looking for some other buzzword of the day to make their worthless blogs seem more meaningful. Consider this example: some mouthbreathing blogger out there used to just be able to say "I AM PODCASTING INTO THE BLOGOSPHERE!" now with Web 2.0 they can say "ZOMG I AM A FULL FLEDGED BLOGGING CONTRIBUTER TO THE WEB 2.0 REVOLUTION ON THE INTERNET, HELPING TRANSFORM THE FACE OF THE WEB!!!!". See, this way they can use actual neat technologies to legitimize their blog about knitting.

So is Web 2.0 good or bad? I don't personally believe what's going on is even worth classifying as "Web 2.0" or even as anything. All I see are technologies like XHTML/CSS and RSS that have been around forever finally actually being used. I'm seeing web applications that finally don't suck. I'm seeing content management systems that aren't unusable bloated trainwrecks. The Web 2.0 label is a forced afterthought that was thrown in to fuel the blog circlejerk and increase hype for so-called "Web 2.0 applications". As we know from the internet bubble, all you need to score some venture capital is a partially-formed idea and copious quantities of hype, both of which the Web 2.0 label provides.

The main problem with Web 2.0 is that it's a bubble waiting to happen. The bloggers out there ramble on about the wonders of Web 2.0 at great length, and will jump on each new site advertising itself as an amazing new Web 2.0 thing purely on the basis that if they don't keep up with it they might become un-cool on the internet. This has given some people the impression that you don't have to have a business model, product, original idea, or anything really, you just need a blog and a Web 2.0 dream to qualify for insane quantities of VC cash.

Examples

There's a ton of examples of things that fall under the massive umbrella. Here are some of the big ones.

Technologies (Please note that none of these are strictly related to Web 2.0 and all the surrounding bullshit, these are just technologies that tend to get referenced alongside Web 2.0)

Standards-Based Design - It's web design, but following actual standards like XHTML/CSS rather than using tables. You know, something that should have happened years and years ago.
RSS - RSS is a content syndication method. A site's content (like news posts) get stripped down to a lightweight XML file that can then be watched easily for updates.
AJAX - Asynchronous JavaScript and XML - it's a method for content delivery where a user can interact with a website, request data from the server, and have the server deliver it without having to refresh the page OR use anything crazy and proprietary like Flash. Look at Google applications like Google Maps and Gmail. See how Google maps fetches new images automatically, unlike old clunky MapQuest where you had to click the edges of a window and refresh the page over and over? That's thanks to AJAX.
Wikis - You're reading one right now. It's a simple method of making a peer-editable information repository.
Weblogs - Software such as Wordpress, Drupal and websites like Blogger and LiveJournal allow people to setup weblogs (aka 'blogs') where they can post about the latest sandwich they made, the last program they wrote, or their political opinions. Weblogs are not a revolution in themselves - people have been updating personal webpages since the Web was created. The difference now is that many more people have Internet access and the software is easier to use, so there is a lower barrier to access. Where the Web 2.0 part comes in is RSS syndication of weblogs and a feature called 'trackbacks' where you can reply to someone else's weblog by making a post on YOUR weblog, and the software sends a message to their weblog about your post. It is this cross-pollinization of weblogs that has led to such innovative terminology as 'blogosphere' and 'blogebrity'.

Concepts

Tagging - Go look at del.icio.us. It's a web-based bookmark manager, but rather than organizing things in a directory structure, items get classified. Gmail is another prominent example of tagging. The idea behind tags is that with a hierarchical organization system like a tree or a directory structure, the actual content you're looking for can only exist in one place, out at the end. With tags, your actual content has any number of tags associated with it, so something can belong to multiple groups, and will show up if you look in one or the other. This (hopefully) changes your workflow from "Oh gosh where did I file away that thing I wanted?!! Time to click through 8 levels of directories!" to "Hm, what I want is related to 'foo', so I should click the 'foo' tag and look for it there." To people who are used to being super ultra organized when it comes to directory structures, this may seem irrelevant, but to less organized people this is amazing.
The Long Tail - STATISTICS! Analysis of sales at retailers like Amazon have shown that if you have a large enough product base, and if your number of niche items is high enough, the number of low-volume niche items sold when taken as a whole may actually out-class the volume being done by bestsellers. The same kind of analysis can be applied to things like Wikipedia. The point it's trying to make is that the low-volume masses out there IN THE BLOGOSPHERE are somehow more important than their high-volume peers in mainstream media. The problem with this concept is that when you apply it to content rather than product, it's pretty safe to assume that it's low volume because it sucks or because no one cares. It looks like the concept applies, but it doesn't.
Ultra-Democratized Content - Look at Wikipedia. Now think of all the problems that arise when you let anyone edit your content. You'll never get really good content this way. You might get passable content, but it could always be full of any number of different errors.
Social Software - Sites like MySpace and Friendster allow you to create a profile and add other people's profiles as 'friends', creating a social network which you can browse. MySpace is probably the most popular example of this right now, being extremely popular in college circles. MySpace profiles are easy to edit and personalize (note how every MySpace page is a poster child for bad web design elements) and allow you to input all sorts of personal information, photos, and even includes a built in weblog. Thus MySpace appeals to trendy attention whores.

Applications

Flock - Take Firefox, add about 10 common popular extensions to the default package, change the skin, add blog integration, rip out the bookmark system and replace it with del.icio.us integration. Now soak it in millions of dollars worth of hype, and dress it up with a trendwhore large-print website.

Summary

The technologies that are finally picking up steam right now are neat, but they shouldn't really be called "Web 2.0" because that's an empty buzzword that's been hijacked by bloggers. If you want to mooch off some Venture Capitalists, devise a 'brilliant' Web 2.0 product, hype it up with a high-quality buzz teaser site and pitch it. If you're lucky, your Peer-edited Fark clone with gradients might score you $2.8mil.

Everything You Never Wanted to Know About Web 2.0

a buzzword demystification zone

History Lesson

What's with the Web 2.0 backlash?

Examples

Summary

Further Reading