Jeffrey Zeldman has pronounced his judgement on the Web 2.0 hype in A List Apart: Web 3.0. Much of his discontent seems to spring from an incident with a Web 2.0 boor:
“Web 1.0 was not disruptive. You understand? Web 2.0 is totally disruptive. You know what XML is? You’ve heard about well-formedness? Okay. So anyway—” And on it ran, like a dentist’s drill in the Gulag.
His comparison to the Marshall McLuhan scene in Annie Hall is amusing enough to make it worth the read. But there are boors in any profession or industry. You don’t give up on something good - and I think that despite the hype, some of the so-called Web 2.0 applications (think Flickr, del.icio.us, bloglines and many others that I don’t even know about yet) are very good because they give anybody with access to a computer the chance to be connected that no one in history ever has before. I can enjoy fruitful collaborations with people from around the world because of some of these technologies. Zeldman’s discomfort with the Web 2.0 hype, and I share this, is that the good stuff will be obscured by the noise of the hype. This seems to be heightened by a sensitization to hype that was earned by living through the Web bubble of the late ’90s:
I hated the bubble. I hated it when Vanity Fair or New York Magazine treated web agency founders like celebrities. I hated that mainstream media and the society it informs either ignored the web or mistook it for a high-stakes electronic version of the fashion industry.
True enough - there are so few media outlets that really get the whole web thing. And what we’re seeing now isn’t really Web 2.0, its more like Web 0.9 - this is just a preview candidate of what the real thing will be like. There is definitely more functionality than we’ve seen before, but the best stuff is yet to come. Those who are easily distracted by the hype may get misdirected for a while, but there will also be those who continue to work and refine and improve the web for the benefit of all. Zeldman concludes with a word of encouragement to these people:
To you who feel like failures because you spent last year honing your web skills and serving clients, or running a business, or perhaps publishing content, you are special and lovely, so hold that pretty head high, and never let them see the tears. As for me, I’m cutting out the middleman and jumping right to Web 3.0. Why wait?
Web 3.0, Jeffrey? I’m still waiting for 1.0!
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January 18th, 2006 at 12:35
I know. Much of what is written out there is not geared toward the common user. McLuhan, in fact, was a technological writer after my own heart. (And I actually aspired to programmer status for awhile!)