Meet Breton, a very sensible bloke, who just produced the most insightful comment I’ve ever read about Web 2.0. In a post on JeffCroft.com called “Web 2.0 != AJAX”, he said the following:
So… web 2.0 is about focusing on user experience and best practices? How is that distinct from what a web designer is supposed to do anyway? Does it matter what tools you accomplish it with? Yeah it’s great that all this new technology is available now. But it doesn’t mean that people that weren’t thoughtful and skilled at usability before, will suddenly become amazing designers thanks to all these lovely new frameworks.
It just seems like we’re all just excited about these new amazing things we can do with JavaScript/Ruby/CSS that we come up with all these hypey buzzwords to make it seem accessible to laymen (and fail at that), and then drape it with a veil of legitimacy by trying to describe it as something more, deeper, and newer, than just good design practices combined with a good knowledge of technology.
~ source: Breton over at JeffCroft.com
He took the words out of my mouth he did.
Of course, the purpose of Jeff’s initial post was to make clear that web 2.0 doesn’t mean Ajax. It doesn’t – but they’re both silly buzzwords nonetheless.