Thoughts about Web 2.0

I was at the Boston area UPA mini-conference recently (which featured 
many Web 2.0 talks), and I have a client who wants to make a current 
project as Web 2.0 as possible. So I've been thinking about the topic a lot.

Some random thoughts for discussion if anyone's up for it. (This 
feels like one of those rambling rants that newspaper columnists 
write when they run out of real topics. Now I see why they do it.)

1. Web 2.0 design
A couple of people defined Web 2.0 at the UPA conference (for now, 
you could read Tim O'Reilly's description at 
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html) 
or talked about how it's changing Web design. My thought was that, 
for all of us greybeards who've been around since before the Web, 
it's as if we can ignore the last 10 years of limited capabilities. 
Web 2.0 lets us provide better user experiences, but it's like going 
back to what we were doing on Windows/Mac platforms. The user doesn't 
know/care what the technology is, and Web 2.0 gives us more of the 
flexibility that we had pre-Web.

As O'Reilly wrote, "We're entering an unprecedented period of user 
interface innovation, as web developers are finally able to build web 
applications as rich as local PC-based applications." I'm not sure 
I'd call it "user interface innovation" exactly. It's innovative if 
you compare it to last year's Web applications more so than if you 
compare it to last decade's Windows apps.

I'm not saying that Web 2.0 is a bad thing; as a Web designer, I'm 
glad to have the flexibility back. It's just not a completely *new* thing.


2. Most popular.
What do you think about having "Most popular <whatever>" categories? 
It's a nice way to see what the crowd likes. But, it's makes the 
popular things be more popular (hmmm, like junior high school 
somehow). Maybe it'd be better to draw from a large or rotating pool 
of popular things so that more kids (er, links) get to be popular.


3. Tags.
Can tags (user-generated taxonomies) replace a pre-defined taxonomy? 
Maybe my problem isn't with the idea of tags, but just that we need 
some new ways to use them. My example: When I'm writing personas for 
clients, I look for photos at flickr.com. I can use tags to do some 
searching, but it's a very simple search. What I really want to do is 
search for "woman professional computer" to find a well-dressed woman 
sitting at a computer in a office. But tags don't do that.

Tags are simple search -- the system is suggesting a series of 
simple, one-term pre-defined searches. I want an advanced search with 
tags. It could be a pre-defined search, but I haven't seen any 
multiple-term clouds yet.


					-- hs

--  --  --  --  --
Hal Shubin
617 489 6595
www.user.com

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