Quit Assigning Version Numbers to the Web
I’m going to say it, and I’m far from the first nor the last to do so. Assigning version numbers to the web is the single most useless and over-rated metric of progress ever to be applied to the any part of the internet. It’s a useless, empty phrase. It’s misapplied and all too often a substitute for actual substance. I make no claim to original thoughts here, but I’ll be damned if it’s not good to say it.
Now, here’s an example of this empty blabber that passes as analysis:
Wikipedia, considered a Web 1.5 service, is experiencing the start of the Web 3.0 movement by locking pages down as they reach completion, and (at least in their German version) requiring edits to flow through trusted experts.
Web 1.5? Web 3.0? Oh please. If you’re not, as some have been saying, doing this to plug your pet company, you’re doing it to disguise your lack of genuine insight. Matt McInerney makes a good point when he writes:
If you want to create Web 3.0, do it. But do it by being innovative. Everyone will notice when they see it. You won’t have to tell everyone.
Unfortunately he, too, uses the versioning of the web as though it were more than an empty marketing term, saying we’re “in the midst of web 2.0”. Now, I can forgive an article for using sloppy terms if it, as this article does, brings some substance, but there is absolutely no excuse in the world for writing about web two oh without bringing anything of substance to the table.
But back to the emptiness of web version numbers. First, what the hell is web 2.0? Well, wikipedia, that ancient relic of web 1.5 (haha) says:
Web 2.0, refers to a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services — such as social-networking sites, wikis and folksonomies — which aim to facilitate collaboration and sharing between users.
This is just stupid. There have been social networking sites for long before web two oh. Wikipedia predates the term by several years. And so on.
What bugs me is that assigning version numbers to the web suggests some leap of progress since earlier versions. And yet, there is none. None whatsoever. The protocols that underly the web are unchanged. Users still navigate web pages by clicking on links. They still enter text by writing into text boxes. Their desktop apps still reside on their harddrive and run on their computer, not on some remote server.
In fact, I’ll be so bold as to say that Java applets and Flash changed the web more than AJAX and wikis and tags ever did. If anything warrants the web two oh mark, it should have been applied circa 1996-97.
So please, all people who write interesting articles about the web, use terms that you know what mean. Then tell me what you mean by them, just to be sure. Using web 2.0 in a non-ironic way without defining it should be sin. And to all you others writing non-interesting, uninspired, substanceless articles about the web, you can just shut up and don’t say anything at all.
I don’t want to read any more discussions about whether wikipedia is 1.5 or 2.0, or what constitutes 3.0.
