I’ve read a lot of designers online mention the “Web 2.0″ buzzword in reference to a design style. I always took Web 2.0 to mean a functional shift in how the Web as a collective system works. So which is it?

Buzzwords, I suppose, are subject to a lot of interpretation. The buzz and hype around an in phrase always seems to fuzz the meaning. In fact, the more buzz, the more fuzz. Of course, there is an original, intended meaning. According to Wikipedia, Tim O’Reilly of O’Rielly publishing fame, and Dale Dougherty from MediaLive Interntaional coined the phrase for a series of conferences. About a year and a half after the term was brithed, O’Reilly published an article to clarify what they meant by Web 2.0. Despite that, the term has gone through the telelphone-game-effect in a very bad way.

The Hype Distortion Field

“It’s not just shiny buttons, it’s Web 2.0!” “Look at all those gradients, they must be Web 2.0!” As a technical person, hearing and reading statements like those make me want to roll some heads. Guess it’s just my innate need to set things right in the world. Somewhere down the line, as non-technical people (a.k.a. marketers) started tossing it about, the term began to encompass more and more. Then management got hold of it and trashed any remnant relevance. Eager to jump on the bandwagon, periodicals began spewing out their uninformed nonsense. And today, we have these designer/beginner programmers slinging it around as if it’s the only way to do web design.

Creating A New Style

Minimalism is a design style. Grunge is a design style. Web 2.0 is not. Yet. That is not to say Web 2.0 websites, from one to another, are not without similarities in their design. There are undoubtedly plenty of sites using the minimalist, gradient-heavy, spit-and-polish glassy design elements. But a fashionable amalgamation of other design elements does not a new style create. No, in fact that’s called a fad. The bandwagon. It only becomes a style or more accurately, a design movement with a lot more time and refinement in the nuances of it’s characteristics. From the design perspective, it’s maturing, but it’s not there yet. As designers, we have to either keep pushing the design elements commonly associated with Web 2.0 to establish the current trends as fad or refine them into a recognizable movement.

To me, Web 2.0 as it stands today refers to guiding principles for more effectively using the web as a framework for creating interfaces between clouds of related information and clouds of related people. It’s using the connected structure of the web to create relational experiences.

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