I’ve intentionally steered from using the term ‘Web 2.0′ very much on this blog because it has all the appeal and substance of a snake oil salesman.

I even used the term: Yuppie Bone Smuggler to equate it in a former post. Time hasn’t softened these feelings.

Both our businesses involve sales so I don’t have anything inherently against intelligent, exciting marketing, but some people have taken the ridiculous notion that the web is enjoying some sort of version upgrade that simply does. Not. Exist. Sadly, some really smart people seem to be championing this lame salespitch. And since the fad is burning faster than a meteor entering the atmosphere those who have tried to build businesses around this are going to be left wearing bell bottom pants to the 2006 prom.

Russell Shaw is among the collective unimpressed:

The problem I have with this “Web 2.0″ slogan is that it is a contrivance, meant to imply a unified movement or wave toward a better Web. Just the very numbering of the thing brings out my moo-goo detector: 1.0 sounds like a beginning. 2.0 (as opposed to a tenth-decimal, such as 1.7 or a 2.4 implies - by its very roundness, a coordinated, standards-based, like-minded rebirth, reconstruction, renaissance, resurrection, whatever you want to call it. 2.0 is the ideal number for such an impression: it implies a concerted, noble effort at refreshing an inspired, but now aging, creation. even “3.0″ implies, well, we didn’t get it right the first time, 2.0 was transitory and is getting long in the tooth, so here we are transitioning to 3.0. But 2.0 sounds good.

The fact that there is a blog network with the name (Web 2.0 Workgroup) that people are part of like Dave Winer — who is about as far from slippery salesman as one can be — really shows the shark has been jumped. Add to that 100+ applications using technology that are several years old (RSS, JavaScript, XML, etc) and you have a marketer’s dream and customer’s nightmare.

More irony: Richard MacManus, also part of the Web Pooh-Point … Oh Workgroup, calls this “dead”:

The thing is, I agree with Russell. The term ‘Web 2.0′ is distracting from the real value going on in the Web right now.

Then there is this whole mashup thing. Why are financial people (VCs primarily) getting all jazzed up about technology that more often than not violates the TOS of other sites when used for commercial purposes? Are they hoping the big companies will buy these crappy programs without consulting their gargantuan legal teams? It seems like a very dicey argument when Adsense is placed next to some mashup programs out there saying they are not being commercially used. Some of these programs are skipping the APIs altogether and scraping pages. Hey, if you won’t give us the data, we’ll just take it. That’s hasn’t ever been considered a stable method of data collection and is downright dishonest.

The widget explosion hasn’t helped. Here you have people — many of which aren’t programmers — blindly mashing apps, TOS be damned. Hey, widgets are used for personal use, so who cares, right? Where did this line of thinking ever come from? Is this a side effect of Web Pooh-Point … Oh?

Finally, you have the use of so called AJAX which is yet another slippery marketing word slapped on old technology. I’m seeing the use of AJAX on programs that are refreshing entire pages using AJAX. Are you freaking kidding me? Why refresh an entire page using AJAX? Talk about waste. It’s like when Flash first came to be and the smart people used a little bit of it to spruce up their site and the other extreme was people thinking they could Flashify their entire website. A little AJAX in the right place could be very wise, but an overdose of anything is ill-advised.

Sour grapes? Nope, that’s not it. I enjoy finding new programs using new and/or innovative ideas. We buy software and subscriptions on the web. I also like to build new things. The best ideas are usually the simple ones that don’t need cling to buzzwords. Look ma, we are using AJAX, we’re cool. We’re sooo Web Pooh-Point … Oh!

[retch]

Let the products/services stand on their own and leave the oily, disingenuious terms out and describe the real underlying technology in the backroom via the developer area where fellow developers might be impressed or perhaps curious. The general public just wants it to work right and fit some type of need in their life, they don’t need, want or like to be sold. People love to buy though! So give them reasons to buy by giving them what they need.

But please don’t break site/API rules to build it. That will just piss people off. That will get people calling their lawyers or firing off emails. Or making angry blog posts.

The web doesn’t need yet another RSS aggregator or tagging application or mashup TOS violating piece of crap that cannot scale. If this keeps up, Web Pooh-Point … Oh could go down as dot.con 2.0.

Word to those making New Year’s Resolutions: axe the web versioning. The shoe doesn’t fit, you must acquit.

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