Looks like the Web 2.0 Naysayers are starting to drown out those of us who’ve been preaching the 2.0 Gospel.
Joel on Software, who has a lot of influence in the programming world, comes down hard with his post entitled Architecture Astronauts Are Back:
“The term Web 2.0 particularly bugs me. It’s not a real concept. It has no meaning. It’s a big, vague, nebulous cloud of pure architectural nothingness. […] I hereby pledge never again to use the term “Web 2.0″ on this blog, or to link to any article that mentions it.”
Yikes! Then Dare Obasanjo, fresh from asking a thousand and one questions at the Web 2.0 Conference, adds:
“I am interested in discussions on the Web as a platform and even folksonomies (not tagging) but the marketplace of ideas has been polluted by all this “Web 2.0″ garbage. Once again, I’ve flipped the bozo bit on Web 2.0. Like Joel, you won’t see any use of the term on my blog or in items I link to from now on.”
Oh and The Register is having a whale of a time mocking Web 2.0. This is the latest from “Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco”:
“Web 2.0 is made of …
* Badger’s paws
* A magic swirling ship
* Javascript worms
* Recycled copies of Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0 newsletter
* Never mind, just give us the money”
But really, there’s only so much unconstructive criticism I can bear. I’m a bit odd like that, but I hate reading cynical things – even if they’re witty. So how about I finish this post with something that actually contributes to the Web 2.0 discussion, whether or not you think Web 2.0 is bullshit. Dave Winer has some thought-provoking questions:
“Isn’t it interesting that between the supposed 1.0 (pet food companies doing high tech IPOs) and 2.0 (build to flip the Flickr of evrything) we changed millennia? Are we still creating monocultures?”
The serious and worrying thing for me is that I’m writing a book about Web 2.0. But then I believe there are a great many things of value in Web 2.0 and that’s what keeps me going. My job is to distill all the signal from the noise – and most of the noise is coming from the anti-Web 2.0 brigade currently. I am also trying to pin down the long-term trends for the Web, together with the real disruptive things that are changing the Web.
Oy. So how was the TechCrunch party last night?
