Confusing jargon: Meaning of Web 2.0 is cloudy
Tuesday, I went to a presentation on Web 2.0. The audience was primarily senior citizens and many of them were mystified by the term “Web 2.0″. Not unreasonably, they thought that such a term should mean something new and different enough that it was tangibly and obviously different from Web 1.0. Being practical people, they hadn’t realized that Web 2.0 was a nebulous buzzword and that it was nothing that required a new browser or looked all that different. The added interactivity that supposedly characterizes Web 2.0 had not struck them as something distinct from the Web pages that they had been browsing all along. They kept asking things like, “Can I use Web 2.0 with my current computer?”, or, “How will I know I’m on Web 2.0 when I’m there?”
The professional computer types should not dismiss these questions as merely those of the great unwashed masses. In fact, the questions put a finger squarely on the fact that terms like “Web 2.0″ are just jargon, more akin to advertising copy than to actual well-defined terms. They don’t help in trying to communicate about computers with the hundreds of millions of ordinary people who use PCs. Sure, the Web now has many more open APIs, more use of the Document Object Model, and more JavaScript but it’s still the Web. The average PC user doesn’t care about any of these details. They don’t care if something is called a “mashup’ or not; they only want to know if a Web site is useful.
To my mind, if you want to define a second version of the Web, it should refer to the difference that broadband has made. Broadband was a quantum leap. We now use the Web in ways that were totally unimaginable in the days of dial-up. The things that people are calling Web 2.0 are only some of the aspects of the broadband revolution.
What’s your opinion? Does the term “Web 2.0″ have any value for the average PC user?
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