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.