I recently chastised my good friend Jen Burkey about using the term “Web 2.0″. I was quickly challenged to a round of blog to blog combat and promptly accepted. I blame our spontaneous self inflicted writing assignment on withdrawal from our alma mater, Trinity University. At the risk of leaving myself eviscerated by the prose of my beautiful opponent, I shall continue.
“Web 2.0″ is an undefined buzz word. That is the beginning and end of my beef with its widespread use. As a software developer, I see the 2.0 as an indication of a new major release. However, last I checked no one came out and sold to the world a brand new internet. We’re still using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (or has the ever present http:// suddenly disappeared from your address bar?) to send content from server to web client. We’re still resolving domain names to IP addresses using DNS servers. And we’re still communicating primarily through web browsers (Matrix plugins coming soon).
Some claim that Web 2.0 encompasses the new interactive nature of the web. Some point to how blogs allow people to create conversations with the consumers of their content and how social media has opened up the internet to everyone. It has admittedly been a long time since I’ve posted to a message board but those seemed pretty democratic to me. Instant messaging had a bigger impact than Twitter. And email predates websites. I’m not going to say that the Twitter and Blogging paradigms don’t change anything, however they don’t change everything.
There is however a Web 2.0 out there. It’s being created by Google and is presently named SPDY (pronounced SPeeDY). If this protocol takes off it would only be a matter of time before you’ll start using ‘spdy://’ to get to your favorite websites (Twitter and Facebook included). This would be, in my (admittedly unimportant) opinion, something worthy of a 2.0 major release label that encompasses the Web as a whole. After all I think everyone would like their emails, websites, videos, and yes even their tweets and podcasts, to load twice as fast. So let’s stop making things a bigger deal than they are and use meaningful language to describe the state of our industry.
And now for something completely different: The Lovely Jen Burkey
Tags: Buzz Words, Web 2.0