What Doesn't Work in Web 2.0

I love Web 2.0. Could you guess by the blog title? :P As I've talked about before, I love the democratic aspect of Web2.0, I love the social aspect of Web2.0, I love the technological innovation aspect of it. All around, the concept is an excellent one, in my opinion.

But what I DON’T love about Web 2.0 is that, with the crush of minds yearning to capitalize on the movement, there is a rash of new sites coming out that are utterly sub-par. The websites themselves don’t bother me, that is, I have nothing against the aims of the websites or their creators; I think they are integral to getting new ideas out there, and advancing useful technology. What bugs me about the websites are, well, the bugs.

I won't get into the design aspect. I am not going to be the arbiter of good design taste in this article. If you wanna be cheesy and look like every other website out there that is, coincidentally, doing the exact same thing, then so be it. That's your business, and if that's what your marketing guy settles on, if you can live with it, so can I.

No, I won't comment on design, because there's a much larger epidemic at work that far supersedes pastels and stupid tech-speak. Namely, it's the code. Many times a user (like yours truly) will try to sign up for one of these sites, or once successful in signing up/registering, you try to submit something and the whole operation behind the glossy facade is revealed to be very shoddy coding.

That should be inexcusable. If a company is going to get the money together to make a website, they make sure that they pay the proper amount of money to get a decent coder that writes a decent app that won’t break when it is told to do something that the website explicitly allows you to do (i.e., SUBMIT CONTENT!). I won't, for the time being, get into specific sites and how much they suck because of their severe flaws, but we've all used them, and we know them. Readers are more than welcome to comment with their fave suck sites, if they wish. (Wait – what readers?! LOL)

I suppose, in the end, that this little quirk in website design and production will eventually work itself out in the form of those sites attracting little useful traffic and thus being forced out of the community. No users = no money, no money = no flashy website, no flashy website = no company. And so it's goodbye cheesy coded website. We can consider it Web Darwinism.

More On The Definition of Web 2.0 ...

I've talked previously on this blog about Web 2.0 being like evolution, and I demonstrated some examples that I had come across. I think that particular view is a little more oriented toward the history of computers and therein data writ large, but that doesn't mean that it is necessarily incorrect or obsolete. It follows that as computers have evolved, so have the ways that we use them. Web 2.0 is an extension of how we use the computers and how computers, in turn, interact with us.

Today as I was browsing through the net, making my usual rounds, I came across an article written some months back on another blog. I figure the article contents are relevant here, given that this blog ( is concerned with, well, WEB 2.0!

From the article, I thought this was pretty funny:

The term itself is now trademarked and spawned a flurry of useless conferences where everyone gets together to talk about the conversations they have already had online.

Anyone interested should check out the comments section of that page, and add your own 2 cents if it's that important to you.

One thing I really appreciate and enjoy about Web 2.0 is the use of the internet as a platform, and making the web a tool that (any)one can use. That's genius! Web apps! What a concept! Taking our applications from local drives and personal computers and freeing up that limited space by running things from servers just makes me all giddy inside. I love that I can start a document, upload it to a server, allow my colleagues to access the file, modify it, and then upload a new version. For me this system is so helpful. It is efficient, and I like that.

I have to also be impressed by how well Web 2.0 lends itself to marketing and flat-out money making. To that end, for some, Web 2.0 is just a new marketing gimmick. It's a new forum to be exploited in new, profit making ways. I don't think there's anything wrong with that; profit and capitalism do bring about a lot of innovation, and innovation (i.e, new ideas) brings about change and improvement. Improvement is good, if we learn anything from the new internet economy and the dot-com crash of 2000, it is that if you stay still too long in this new economy you will very quickly become outdated and will be left behind.

Another aspect of Web 2.0 that gets talked about a lot is how it is a socially supported web culture. Which is to say, that since a lot of Web 2.0 is dependent upon user interaction with not only the site itself, but other visitors and users of the site, it very naturally breeds an organic network. Sites like MySapce and FaceBook have seized upon this idea, and it has spilled over into the news media with the social bookmarking sites like Reddit and Digg.

Of course, if you really want to know, you can always just check here.