Stop Buzzing Web 2.0

I've heard a lot about the buzzword "Web 2.0" since last year. I didn't bother it until it started coming up among the colleagues in my company recently.

I admit that I'm a geek with a whole bunch of jargons and stuffs running all over my head. I also admit that I'm sometimes being a little too serious with things which just do not sound to me. However, I do ignore them most of the time.

Nonetheless, this little buzzword just drove me crazy because there is quite a large portion of people using it as if it was the official name!!! I was so irritated by those misleading "Web 2.0" logos and shameless ads and articles, so I did some more research on the web. There may be some more to be added, but roughly what I came up with "Web 2.0" is:


- a vague definition

There is no detailed specification, as what we call "standard", provided. Although many people have tried, but obviously no one can clearly specify such a specified generalization. (Yes, I know it sounds conflicting, because it is!) In fact, not even big organizations such as W3C has a clear definition because the scope would be HUGE!!!

- a bad and incorrect, if not meaningless and arbitrary, terminology

"Terminology, in its general sense, simply refers to the usage and study of terms, that is to say words and compound words generally used in specific contexts."

Usually, a term may consist a number of sub-terms where each sub-term has its own meaning. For instance, ice-cream, automobile, cellular phone, etc. Otherwise, there should be reason(s) on using some meaningless sub-terms for symbolic purpose such as vitamin C, blood type B, the WWII, etc.

Here you may challenge that "Yes, Web 2.0 falls into the latter category just like WWI and WWII!" Unfortunately, "2.0" is obviously a version number and contains the little dot which we don't have in WWI and WWII; nobody says world war 1.0 or WW 2.0, because it is ridiculous.

With the previous challenge failed, you may go on with your claims like, "Yes, 2.0 IS a version number. Software have version numbers too, right?" However, this statement does not make any sense, again. First of all, the world wide web is NOT a piece of software that a group of developers can take control of. It is used and/or developed by numerous of users and/or developers. Secondly, there is no such thing as Web 1.0 (not even on W3C) clearly defined anywhere. Moreover, the web development is continuous, unlike software development which is interrupted by milestones and releases, just like the languages we speak. If people started using terms like "English 2.0", "French 0.8 beta", or "Japanese 1.5RC", then it would make sense for "Web 2.0" to exist. :P

- an irrespectful, if not irresponsible, naming

Despite the fact there are hundreds of millions of people using/developing all the aspects of the web, the term "Web 2.0" tries to neglect all those hard works behind. Information Technology developments such as software (web server , browser), programming/markup languages (Javascript, Java, PHP, HTML, DOM, XML), web application frameworks (Struts, Tapestry, Ruby on Rails), security and data encryption (SSL, MD5, PGP) are all neglected and generalized with a single version number attachment - Web 2.0.

If we generalize all these hard works into "Web 2.0", we should have Spanish and Italian put into "Latin 2.0", or plasma and LCD TV mixed into "TV 2.0" also.


If you agree with any of the above, please stop using such a buzzword as a no-brainer does, learn and think what you are going to talk about before opening your mouth.



Bibliography:
[1] Web 2.0 -- Wikipedia
[2] http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html
[3] O'Reilly -- What Is Web 2.0