#comments

Ok. This is something that has bugged the crap out of me since the combination of Web and 2 point oh. I reluctantly went with the flow, but recently some articles came out arguing about naming and it got my hamsters running in their wheels and I had some more concrete ideas on this oh so important thing. First off, Scoble decided to bust on the folk pushing Web 3.0. I whole heartedly approved of that, except that he then went on and ruined it by pushing the 2010 Web in its place. Then Swisher stood up for Web 3.0 and wrote up a piece on why it didn’t matter what it was named.

Let’s talk about this. The 2010 Web. I really have a ton of problems with this. I guess I’ll just start off with Scoble’s own analogy. Cars. He likens this to cars. Like a 1994 Honda. Except that the analogy is completely wrong, a closer one would be that a particular website would be a yearly model, the 2008 model of comments.deasil.com, for example. The “web” would then be analogous to the automobile industry. Yet we don’t hear that industry calling their cars Car 2.0 and Car 3.0. You know, Car 2.0 had standard side air bags and automatic adjusting seats. Car 3.0 has those fancy rear view cameras and dashboard gps. I mean. It’s just stupid.

The real problem I have with a yearly indicator is that it tries to make a future and nebulous idea concrete. That is, no one will *know* what the 2010 web is until it is 2011. So you talk about something that is concretely labeled with a specific timeframe before you’ve entered that time frame – so the 2010 Web will mean something completely different in 2009 than it will in 2011 – the meaning shifts radically. Which isn’t really good. Also, what if I’m in 2009, can I be building a 2010 web site? I guess so. Although, I won’t really know I was doing that for sure until 2011. It’s silly. The web doesn’t change yearly it changes daily.

Web 3.0 on the other hand, when you look at it in this light is much more reasonable. It tries to encapsulate general eras of the web. It walks a nebulous line with nebulous naming and kinda is ok. My beef with it is that it tries to create a hard line where there aren’t really hard lines to be found. It implies a concreteness that simply does not exist. It is extra annoying because it implies, also, that there will be minor releases. Hey, did we already go through Web 2.1? Web 2.2? Did I miss Web 2.5 Beta? Web 2.0 had at least a cutesy thing going for it – it was if annoying at least appropriate to the zeitgeist of the time. Web 3.0 is just silly.

Here’s the thing I figured out. In discussion of all this naming business, I’ve already lost the battle – it’s the media and the geeks framing the question so that they’ve already won. It’s like saying, George Bush, good president or great president? It’s the wrong question. Why can’t we just call the whole thing “the web”. Discussion of the web will mean current trends. Because, you know, who is going to have a conference about last year’s web technology? Right? When you go to the New York International Auto Show you kinda know you’re going to see the near and far future products. Not the models from 2 years ago. See how that works?

If you want to discuss older trends you can give broad era’s, early 2000’s web, late 90’s web. You know they provide a good and broad basis for what you’re talking about. The problem is simply that nerds love to label stuff (and I include myself under that august label), there’s whole bits of Stargate Atlantis where they discuss what they’re going to call new things. In this case, the discussion of which bad and useless naming scheme to use should be gotten rid of and we should all just go back to talking about the web. I’m just saying. Are you for against this naming business?