twopointouch

Mis-Information Week perpetuates the myth that Web 2.0 is all about AJAX. The standfirst to the article lays the groundwork, suggesting that this is purely about technologies, when surely approaches would be a better way to begin:

To bring your site into the Web 2.0 world, you need to know about Ajax, ActiveX, RSS, and other key technologies.

As the intro confirms, this brave new world of Web 2.0 is supposedly all about appearances: “you ignore the new lingo at your own peril; enterprises that put up plain-Jane Web sites today risk turning away the more discerning browsing customer.” But it’s not just about AJAX. Oh no. It’s also about littering your site with pointless bling: clever developers “spice up content and make their sites more dynamic … Use polls, surveys, RSS feeds, and tag rolls.” (OK, I’ll allow them RSS feeds as important).

Only on page four of four is there a hat-tip to the idea that the way sites work with users might have the least importance: “I also include social aspects and smaller, lightweight components as keys to Web 2.0,” says Tony Karrer, the CEO of TechEmpower.

I have to assume that the piece was either poorly commissioned or subbed rather heavily, since the author, David Strom, is actually a lot better informed than this piece suggests.

Anyway, back to the point. No, it is not about AJAX. It’s not really about languages at all. You could write an application in fridge magnets and it could still be called Web 2.0 if it meets other criteria (lightweight models, perpetual beta, read/write access, collective intelligence, etc). Yes, a rich interface is also an important part of the idea, because that enhances usability - the human angle again, see? And those rich interfaces are something that AJAX facilitates. But that’s all it is, part of the toolbox. No-one, to my mind, has put this point better than Socialtext’s Ross Mayfield:

I’d bet the future is less the Matrix than Soylent Green. Less semantic fuzz than social discovery. Less artificial intelligence than human intelligence. Less automation and more augmentation.

Soylent Green is a 1973 Charlton Heston movie. At the end, he discovers that the new miracle food from the Soylent corporation is made of dead bodies. “Soylent Green Is People!” he bellows to an unhearing crowd in the last line. The same is true of 2.0 applications and sites.

Nick Carr comments today about the competing definitions for Web 2.0 and the use of jargon, concluding that at the heart of the matter is … well, nothing. Writing about Tim O’Reilly’s What is Web 2.0? essay, he states:

O’Reilly provided a series of observations and impressions, and, really, that’s the best way to approach any discussion of “Web 2.0.” You need to “walk around the subject,” because if you try to get to the center of it you’ll find there’s nothing there.

I’ve written about this at some length before. If no-one agrees about what Web 2.0 is - and believe me, they don’t - doesn’t that mean it’s the Emperor’s New Clothes? That there’s ‘nothing there’? I can understand Carr’s point and appreciate why he says it, but I think he’s wrong. Things that are quite big and complicated are very difficult to define and people disagree about them. Philosophers have spent at least 3000 years attempting to define ‘good’, ‘evil’, ‘beauty’, and ‘knowledge’. They are things that most of us would agree exist yet we can’t seem to get a handle on their precise meaning. The typical philosopher is pretty bright, but can they agree? Can they heck.

Look at the very beginning of O’Reilly’s essay recounting a discussion in early 2004:

The concept of “Web 2.0″ began with a conference brainstorming session between O’Reilly and MediaLive International. Dale Dougherty, web pioneer and O’Reilly VP, noted that far from having “crashed”, the web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity.

At that point, when the discussion started, there was no talk of the web as platform, collective intelligence, AJAX or any of the other memes surrounding this subject. They all got added on afterwards. What Dougherty was talking about was economic regeneration and a fresh excitement about the Internet following the first wave that ended in the NASDAQ crash of 2001. That’s why it’s called 2.0, not because it’s got tags or ‘UGC’ or data as the new Intel Inside. Well, that, and the fact that it was a pretty buzzy name for a conference.

So where does that leave us now? Well, it means that Web 2.0 is quite an appropriate description for ‘exciting new applications and sites’ - that was how the expression was coined. It may well have tags, social media, networks and all those shenanigans, but it doesn’t need to. The main thing is that they are innovative. And the thing about innovative sites and services, if they really are innovative, is that they are a bit different to the things we had before they arrived. Web 2.0 is a moving target, sure, but that behaviour goes to the heart of its meaning.

Update: if more than five people link to this post, I will declare a moratorium on headlines involving lyrics from Boston.

One thing you have to love about ZDNet blogger Dion Hinchcliffe are his wacky infographics.

Here’s Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 in a pretty scary nutshell:

Here’s what it all means. (I’ll comment on this when I have time to do it justice).

And here’s his flickr set of similar pics to spice up your PowerPoint and boggle your audience. Dion has stated that he’s fine with people re-using them, providing they’re attributed.