W-Shadow.com

Not “cool” like “the concept of web 2.0 posesses a large amount of coolness” or “web20.cool == true“. For many people Web 2.0 equals “cool”. That’s what I understood after reading this fine blog post.

Programmers and the like might know Web 2.0 is about things like AJAX, social networking, “folksonomies” et cetera. Some might even understand what those terms mean. Yet to the average Internet user these cryptic buzzwords may quickly become simply another way to say “cool”, “modern” and “interesting”. He/she might think Web 2.0 is all about rounded corners, gradient fills, weird puctuation (e.g. “del.icio.us”) and elegant rotating progress displays. And who’s to say (s)he’s wrong? After all, nobody really knows for sure what Web 2.0 is.

Hey, look at me, I’m Web 2.0! 🙂

Personally I don’t care if something is “Web 2.0 – enabled” or whatever. In my opinion Web 2.0 isn’t something you should strive to be/create, it’s not a “design factor”. If for something to work well it has to use some Web 2.0 techniques, great, but it shouldn’t be the designers aim to stuff as many tricks as possible into a new project.