We don’t need another bubble; a tub ‘o suds will do just fine, thank you.

Whatever you may think of the term Web 2.0 — or, for that matter, the strategies and technologies that the term purports to represent - if you are in the business of designing, developing, marketing, or maintaining websites or applications you should be afraid, very afraid, of the jargon-hype beast that has gurgled back to life over the last year or so. It’s like the umpteenth sequel of some awful horror movie — and, true to the genre, this (re)incarnation is much scarier and more dangerous than its predecessors. The reason why, as Jeffrey Zeldman so eloquently points out, is quite simply that the hype obscures the unglamorous, but beautiful, truth of this moment in the web’s rocky history; and it threatens to shoot us into disrepute (again) by inflating the fabulousness (and profitability) of the current crop of neato products such as flickr, del.icio.us, and the like.

What I hear Zeldman saying (not to put words in his mouth), is that things have been getting really fun again. There’s enough interest, creativity, and money out there to fuel a widening variety of challenging and thought-provoking projects (and, not incidentally, to support a growing number of folks like us who make their living working on those projects). I’m hoping that the Web 2.0-ish hype won’t be necessary to continue this trend — and I am definitely concerned that the hype will overtake the reality and squelch the fun.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 17th, 2006 at 5:04 pm and is filed under General, Finds.