caitlin gannon

It’s an ideavirus of epic proportions — lately all I read about in the webdev news is Web 2.0. What it is, what it isn’t, how tired people are of it, whether there’s still money to be made doing it. Web 2.0 loosely defined is a combination of tools (Ajax/Ruby), approaches (social networking, community-created content) and a certain look and feel (rounded corners and silly names). But what’s the relevance for those of us who work in enterprises where web apps have to be built on a more solid foundation than coolness? Is Web 2.0 just a pretty trend?
The term was coined by O’Reilly when they put on a “Web 2.0″ conference in 2004. An excerpt of their definition of the term from “What Is Web 2.0“:

The question is particularly urgent because the Web 2.0 meme has become so widespread that companies are now pasting it on as a marketing buzzword, with no real understanding of just what it means. The question is particularly difficult because many of those buzzword-addicted startups are definitely not Web 2.0, while some of the applications we identified as Web 2.0, like Napster and BitTorrent, are not even properly web applications! …

Let’s close, therefore, by summarizing what we believe to be the core competencies of Web 2.0 companies:

• Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
• Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
• Trusting users as co-developers
• Harnessing collective intelligence
• Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
• Software above the level of a single device
• Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models

The next time a company claims that it’s “Web 2.0,” test their features against the list above. The more points they score, the more they are worthy of the name. Remember, though, that excellence in one area may be more telling than some small steps in all seven.

In a recent interview, WWW creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee sees some aspects of Web 2.0 as a reason for deeper thought about universal standards and the semantic web:

Standards like CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), the document object model and so on are surfacing as things that some people call Web 2.0 - but really it’s a use of existing technology.

Mash-ups are called Web 2.0, and are limited data integrations - taking a piece of display technology like a map application and doing a handcrafted data integration. I’ve yet to see a mash-up that takes any generic semantic Web data and maps it - the fact that everyone has their own mash-up shows the need for semantic web standards.

Core Concepts:

• The Long Tail: the collective strength of many small websites, blogs, etc. that comprise the bulk of the content on the Web. In marketing terms the Long Tail means that many thousands of small transactions (Google AdSense clicks for example) can add up to as much as or more than a handful of large transactions (and AdSense is much easier to implement).
• User base: the value of services like Flickr, eBay or BitTorrent lies in the size of its user base. People are more attracted to active, rich communities, and will invite their friends. More users means more value to advertisers.
• Collective intelligence: wikis and collaborative knowledge sharing platforms allow site visitors to create their own content. If implemented correctly, an enterprise knowledge base wiki can leverage the experience of thousands of writers instead of just a few. Edits and corrections are the responsibility of everyone. Of course, there are drawbacks (duplicate content, bad content, not conforming to style guidelines) but these can be managed.
• Open-source software. Development, documentation and testing is shared by many users who like being able to contribute to a project. In return, the product is free.
• Applications are never really finished since they are constantly being tested and updated. The traditional software release cycle doesn’t fit here.

There are, of course, skeptics:

• Sick of rounded corners and words missing vowels
• Tired of products always being in “beta”
• Companies have no solid business model other than “it uses AJAX”

Other resources:

• Media Ocean posted a link to a March 2006 video by U Tech that gives a history and overview of Web 2.0.
• Webmonkey also recently published a recent article called Web 2.0: A Pattern Library .

I use Wikipedia almost daily, but today this dialog box struck a nerve:

Search? Go? What’s the difference? Why would they make such a simple task so confusing, especially on a site that is otherwise very user-friendly?

Curiosity about such things being part of my job, I tried “Searching” for a term (”latte”) versus “Going” for it (which, of course, makes me think more about going for a latte than working on usability issues).

Turns out that “Go” produces the wikipedia entry (if any) with the same name as the search word, while “Search” produces a result set of all wikipedia entries containing that word.

On the German site it’s much clearer: “Artikel” vs. “Suche.” Certainly the English language is also flexible enough to offer a choice more specific than “Go”!

Don Norman is sick of hearing people talk about how Google is so simple. The truth about Google’s so-called “simplicity” is that “anybody can make a simple-looking interface if the system only does one thing”. But behind the search page, it’s not so simple after all:

If you want to do one of the many other things Google is able to do, oops, first you have to figure out how to find it, then you have to figure out which of the many offerings to use, then you have to figure out how to use it. And because all those other things are not on the home page but, instead, are hidden away in various mysterious places, extra clicks and operations are required for even simple tasks – if you can remember how to get to them.

Norman even dares to suggest that - gasp - Yahoo! and MSN are actually easier to use, because all the user’s options are immediately available and the user doesn’t have to go poking around through the site looking for them.

Is Google simple? No. Google is deceptive. It hides all the complexity by simply showing one search box on the main page. The main difference, is that if you want to do anything else, the other search engines let you do it from their home pages, whereas Google makes you search through other, much more complex pages. Why aren’t many of these just linked together? Why isn’t Google a unified application? Why are there so many odd, apparently free-standing services?

Long live the iconoclasts! The “Google is so simple” meme is traveling the webdev world at lightning speed. It’s going to take some work to mount up a counter-meme (especially one that includes “MSN” and “good” in the same sentence).

plentyoffish.com and the role of anti-marketing design

Robert Scoble’s microsoft blog offers an interesting theory about simple (or ugly) design — that an un-designed site is somehow more appealing and makes more money. Sites like MySpace, Google, CraigsList are notoriously simple in design and also incredibly popular. Perhaps there is something about slick, designer-ish websites that turns off the average user.

The comment trail on Scoble’s post is particularly interesting in its discussion of the differences between ugly, usable, simple, anti-corporate, etc.