JONTILLMAN.COM | part of the problem since 1976

I have, since the term first began to appear, had an innate revulsion for the idea of “web 2.0″. I didn’t buy Tim O’Reilly’s definition then, and I don’t buy any of the other punditry now.

As a matter of fact, other than some shiny bits tacked onto the same old contentless “tools” and “networks”, Web 2.0 looks a whole lot like Bubble 2.0 to me; a bunch of market wonks using an ill-defined sound-bite as a way to seperate venture capitalists from money.

So I was delighted to hear that Tom Orlowski speaking at Wobble 2.0 hit the nail on the head:

web2.0 is fundamentally about “presentation layer people trying to solve infrastructure problems”

To which Seamus McCauley adds:

The web2.0 bubble is about businesses continuing to deny what web1991, TBL’s [Tim Berners Lee's] original innovation, really means—the long-term unlikelihood of realising business-scale returns from digital.

Cheers fellas! Nothing warms my heart like people calling a spade a spade, and this emperor surely has no clothes. I’ll wait for Web 3.1; that will be it’s first glimpes of being usable anyway…