December 21, 2005
“does web 2.0 actually exist?”
Stowe Boyd chronicles the argument (for and against) rather well.
Web 2.0 has become widely used as an indicator that something different is going on with recent innovations on the web. It is being adopted by a wide range of people, including marketing weasels and earnest technologists, each of whom have their own reasons for adopting the term.
[Afterthought:]
The age-old battle is not “Geeks vs Marketers”.
The age-old battle is “Geeks vs Markets”.
Why should it be geeks against markets? Markets exist everywhere where there’s supply and demand. A market is an exchange between two people.
I’d say it IS geeks against marketers, because geeks care for inherent product attributes, not for corporate image. Geeks often circumvent the whole marketing world. The product goes directly from manufacturing to customer. Communication without middlemen.
That’s also why Web 2.0 doesn’t exist. It doesn’t offer a product, it only offers words. Computer-literates couldn’t care less, they want actual usability, actual communication.
I wouldn’t say Geeks did a very good job of circumventing the marketing world in terms of Apple (you could argue that Steve Jobs was the best marketer of the late 20th Century).
This idea that geeks are “beyond marketers” was probably originally written by a marketer. heh.
“I’d say it IS geeks against marketers, because geeks care for inherent product attributes, not for corporate image”.
As Mena would say.…bullshit
I’m a geek. And I’m a marketer. And I’m a salesman. And I make the coffee, turn off the light, and sweep the floor. I care for product attributes, corporate image and the state of my floors.
“The product goes directly from manufacturing to customer. Communication without middlemen”
Laughable
Good communicators are rare. And essential.
For the record, I prefer the parties put on by marketing.…
Either/or/vs shows a two dimensional thinking, frankly Hugh the world works in a more complicated way. In other words ‘Bumpersticker logic vs. reality’
Hugh, maybe my Mac would agree there
But mainly I bought it because it works, because it doesn’t annoy the hell out of me (like most other op. systems), and because it’s a little, quiet thing that sits on my desk, instead of a noisy big chunk. I’d call those product attributes. Now I’m not sure how much geek I am, but most of the time I couldn’t care less about advertising; perhaps I’m an exception in that.
As far as Geeks Go Apple, I’m not sure if most of them are actual geeks, instead of just Tech-Fans or Fashion-Geeks. Real geeks probably still use Linux and buy music players that can play Ogg Vorbis files, not iPods.
First thought that occured to me upon reading this sentence is that ‘hacker chic’ of that sort has been coopted by marketers a while ago
“I’d say it IS geeks against marketers, because geeks care for inherent product attributes, not for corporate image. Geeks often circumvent the whole marketing world. The product goes directly from manufacturing to customer. Communication without middlemen.”
Nice marketing there Ulrich, except I’m not sure who’s buying.
here’s my take on this web2.0 thing :
When I read the Cluetrain, I thought it was all about authenticity and openness (“get ride of the firewalls”) with everything centered around the sharing experience. I was SURE that the cluetrain explained where we would be heading.
Web2.0 is more about technique: RSS/podcast/AJAX , If you don’t have these, you’re not web2.0… the openness idea comes second. This makes the term more of an empty shell than anything else.
If web2.0 is aimed at centering everything on the user, why isn’t it about Creative commons and open source (which is totally geared on giving power to users) ?
gui82: excellent point. The ‘web 2.0′ idea is an architectural/process one, the user experience improvements – delightful as they are – remain just skin-deep: Craigslist is much more ‘Web 2.0′ than Gmail.
In some instances, you can improve the user experience *and* engage their social value, like with tags on del.ico.us: they’re easier to deal with than directories for personal organization *and* enable information sharing.
I would also argue that, in the same manner that usability is skin-deep, open source is the inverse: far too low-level a detail. The vast majority of users do not care what development process produced a certain piece of functionality. Would you use wikipedia less if the wiki software that powered it was proprietary?
Licensing (creative commons etc.) does provide an interesting example of something that is both generally opaque to the user yet relevant to the ‘participatory culture’ process. I definitely wouldn’t contribute to Wikipedia if it was all rights reserved&hellip
Very interesting .I will think about that.