Web 2.0 hype: Time to try decaf.

2516287 — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 14:31:00 GMT

I’ll admit I’m a bit of a luddite when it comes to jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon. So it may come as a surprise to some that this is my first ever “Blog". Don’t get me wrong; I’m far from being a technophobe on any level, with the goal of producing somewhat delicious irony for my blog’s title. Over the years, I have written regular short articles about news and daily life, formulated opinions and vented my frustrations and put them online in a web-based journal. Sound familiar?

But package that up with a cool name, wrap it up with an aura of “the little guy that could take on The New York Times” and immediately, everyone must have a “Blog”.

I’ll reiterate again, I love technology and live and breathe the t’interweb. But bearing the scars of a couple of dot-com booms and busts now, there’s one thing I can’t stand in my line of work: hype. And more precisely, how some marketing types go into a frenzy as soon as they latch on to the latest Web 2.0 buzzword du jour like it’s the latest must-have accessory.

Let me give you a recent example.

I love widgets. I have them all over my desktop and on my phone – they’re great for telling me the weather or the time of the train I just missed. They just sit there, do what I need them to do, and nothing else.

A client of ours loves them as well, and wanted us to build one to broadcast messages to their agents. But without considering a purpose of what a widget is for, they ended up dismissing all sense of usability or usefulness. “Can we have background sound as well? That you can’t turn off so everyone can hear it? Oh! And can it take up half the screen on top of the other windows? And display whole web pages? And can it automatically send emails back to base?”

Having all said and done, not all hype is bad, it drives the web forward in developing more cool stuff. But like many good things, they are best enjoyed in moderation.

Through this blog I hope I can provide some perspective from us techies on the coal-face of web development, demystifying some of the marketese and buzzwords where we can along the way. If we can also bring some level of common sense and consideration for the user, as we can be a little tunnel-visioned by marketing goals at times, then I will be a happy bunny.

P.S. Am I behind the times? I’ve heard from an Account Director that we’re up to Web 3.5 now. What that entails exactly is beyond me - I missed the release notes when Web 3.0 was in Beta.

Facebook Fatigue

2085942 — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 07:09:00 GMT

Recent research from the Future Foundation, presented at the Women & Technology seminar shows that whilst the frequency of Internet usage of men and women is similar, women & men use the internet for different things in different ways. For example, women are more likely to have uploaded photos, videos or music to a web-site. Women are more likely to have created a personal blog. Women are more likely to have created and updated a personal profile on a social networking site.

According to the Future Foundation, women use a social networking site on average 3 times a week (compared to 3.2 times amongst their male counterpart). Whereas men are more likely to consider “making my opinion heard”, “sharing views” and “displaying personal creativity” key reasons for social networking, women are more likely to use the sites to form communities and listen to the views of other women. My own experience of Facebook echoes this. At first, I loved it. I discovered that I could get in touch with people that I had lost contact with. I enjoyed adding them to my growing friend list (which made me feel popular) and discover what they were up to. For a while I updated my profile religiously and I imagined that my contacts would be curious about what I was up to.

However, as my friend-list grows I found myself overwhelmed by updates from my modest list of friends. I began to realise that there is a very good reason I do not keep in regular contact with the extended cloud of contacts with whom facebook shares my updates. The truth is that I'm not that all that curious about their lives and nor are they with mine otherwise we would have never have lost contact in the first place. Most of the 'status updates' consist of mundane activities of people I barely know any more. Consequently the more friends I add, the less valuable Facebook becomes.

Cory Doctrow was one of the first to debate the diminishing value of social networking: The more people get involved in a social network, the more users are likely to encounter people they'd rather avoid. And whilst it may be socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list, deleting them from your friend-list is practically a declaration of war. The problem seems to be that Facebook treats a mundane update like 'watching TV' with the same degree of importance as 'Getting married'. Likewise it cannot distinguish between my closest friends and people I've not seen since I was a child but thought it would be fun to add to Facebook.

My own usage of Facebook has declined rapidly after an initial bubble of enthusiasm. I no longer feel a desire to monitor my friends' updates. The barrage of mostly meaningless email solicitations from 3rd party plug-ins. In Cory's words, the social network has transformed into something which has "the social graces of a nose-picking, hyperactive six-year-old, standing at the threshold of your attention and chanting, "I know something, I know something, I know something, won't tell you what it is!" Obviously the social networks need to find a balance between 3rd party added-value and the proliferating nuisance from third-party extensions. That should be easy enough and a good start, but there is a much bigger problem to solve: In order to make the networks more appealing to women, companies and brands need to find a way to stay relevant post that initial bubble. I'd like to see a social network which can recognize that not all friends are created equal.

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Web 2.0 hype: Time to try decaf.

Facebook Fatigue