I like James’ skypecasting idea. I think it would be interesting to see if the contstraint of a single voice channel acually helps with focusing attention. And people could always break off later into individual skypes. Voice alone is not enough though. What it needs is screensharing.

So first DevBuddies assignment: can you set up a VNC multicast in parallel with a skypecast? And for bonus points, be able to record both to video.

I don’t think that Web 2.0 is about making things better. I think it’s about making things cooler. The amount of Web 2.0 products out there which (a) make no sense and (b) have a non-sensical business model, is just plain insane. But they often look cool, or use cool geek tools (or at least TRY to).

One of the biggest problems with the Nakatomi parody is that it seemed impossible to actually make everything sound ridiculous enough so that people would know we were a parody. In fact, not soon after we launched the homepage were we informed of COMPETITORS which seemed to do exactly what Nakatomi was claiming… even though what we were claiming made no sense, had no substance, and didn’t describe anything.

I think what you are trying to do is change the usage of the term Web 2.0, but that’s dangerous because you won’t be successful, and companies will take advantage of any attempt to legitimise Web 2.0 to waste everyone’s time and money with stuff that wouldn’t even get funding back during the bubble.

The focus should always, ALWAYS, be on creating a great product. Your marketing should always focus on how your product is great. If it happens to get the label "Web 2.0", then that’s just a coincidence.

The Web 2.0 phrase has been misused so much by now that it is essentially meaningless and, good intentions or no, I don’t think it can be legitimately redefined as being synonymous with "great product". In fact, given the amount of SHIT products which have the Web 2.0 sticker applied to their name, you’re not going to be able to redefine it.

Justin, anecdotal examples are not proof of any larger trend. Do you have any statistics to back your argument up?

However, I’d just like to comment regarding the "only geeks use RSS" line. this is rapidly becoming, frankly, horseshit — and oft-repeated horseshit at that, particularly in the Irish blogosphere, for some reason!

Look: my *mother* uses RSS. she goes to a page she likes in Firefox; she sees the little "feed" icon in the URL bar; she drags and drops the URL icon into the feed reader, hit "OK" a couple of times, and she’s subscribed to a new feed. where’s the scary techie bleeding edge there?

Note, however, that she doesn’t know it’s called "RSS", or that it includes "XML". she just knows that she’s got a new feed. that’s all she needs to know, and it’s perfect.

What it’s not synonymous with is AJAX, pastel colours, RSS or any combination of technologies. Those are some of the things we have to play with at the moment to deliver better products but we have to keep refocusing on the end, not the means. Web 2.0ing isn’t an all or nothing change, it’s a process. If your users get confused by your changed application then that’s telling you something! Maybe you need to undo and try again.

You’re right though. Delivering better products for users shouldn’t need a buzz-word.

Re: RSS. I totally agree that the user experience is horrible for non-geeks. Future apps, browsers and operating system upgrades will, of course, address this. I believe we can make it a whole lot better.

What has always worried me about the "web 2.0" movement, is that a company may decide to "web 2.0" their product offerings, and so decide to bung in AJAX, pastel colours, some DOM scripting effects, and then site back and wait for the money to roll in. Meanwhile, users come to the new application and are entirely confused.

Take RSS feeds for example. Who uses them? Geeks. That’s who. And they are damn useful, TO GEEKS. But I’ve yet to see a usage model for RSS feeds which is useful for non-geeks.

Non-geeks don’t have feed readers that they use… sure, Outlook may have an RSS reader built-in, but they won’t see the connection between the feed URL and the main Outlook window. Even the best browser feed reader, Safari, is pretty lame for keeping track of updates to several blog feeds.

What’s the best alternative for non-geeks? A mailing list, which emails you whenever a blog has been updated. But mailing lists are, like, SO web 1.0… why would you have one of those up on your fancy web 2.0 blog?

Web 2.0 is not synomous with a better product.

The whole community needs to do a better job in working together. At the end of the day we need great developers to great great products - only way we can compete on a world stage.