Signal to Noise

This article isn’t so much postulating that Web 2.0 is a “bad thing”, but rather grappling with the various definitions of Web 2.0.  Have a peek:

If Web 2.0 is the answer then we are clearly asking the wrong question, and we must not be fooled by the cool sites and apparently open APIs. Most of the effort is – literally – window dressing, designed to attract venture capitalists to poorly-considered startups and get hold of enough first-round funding to build either a respectable user base or enough barely runnable alpha code to provide Google or Yahoo! with yet another tasty snack. We need to take a wider view of what is going on.

I’ll say that my definition of Web 2.0 is “what we’re doing today to connect people in a way that is free of monolithic information architectures and which caters to the individual needs of individual users”.  My definition is, of course,  very broad one.  But The Register guy who wrote this piece seems to think that Ajax plays a central role in Web 2.0, not just from an engineering standpoint, but from a philosophical one. And I definitely don’t agree with that.

To me, Web 2.0 has never really been about coding or the preferences of the developer. It’s always been about the preferences of the user: creating states and modes of operation for each user that permit the most effective communication to and from that user, or the most effective data recall on that user’s behalf. And to diss Google, arguably the first wide-scale implementor of the 2.0 philosophy, on account of not adhering to open standards, is probably not giving Google the credit they deserve.  Look at all the standards support Google is pushing: Jabber, XML, you name it.  Google isn’t in business to create standards; they’re in business to use them.  And, last time I looked, Ajax was a highly-accessible standard, not some entrapping web API, a la Microsoft.
I’m also a little put off by the comparison between the evolution of the web and the Marxist definition of the rise of socialism.  In my mind, Web 2.0 is more about the empowerment of individuals, or the democratization of the web, as opposed to the suppression of individual ideas and freedoms.  Perhaps this is why user-generated content figures so heavily into the 2.0 concept.

And there are also some fundamental differences between the meteoric rise and fall of 1.0 and the way businesses are approaching 2.0 ventures.  For one, there’s a breed of successful, cash-wealthy corporations that survived and thrived through the 1.0 bust.  These guys are careful how they spend their dough (though arguably, some bold, high-profile moves of dough have been made: Ebay/Skype and Google/Youtube come to mind).  Secondly, there’s not nearly the amount of exuberant venture capital flowing into 2.0 companies as there was during the 1.0 heyday.

So, to pronounce 2.0 dead on account of irrational exuberance is also, I think, very premature.  Go read the guy’s article, and you tell me if you agree that it sounds like sour grapes from somebody who holds some very religious ideas about software engineering.