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Welcome to the irrational part of the web. This document introduces the notion of “Web 3.14159… ” websites and how to distinguish them from mere “Web 2.0” sites. If this sounds stupid to you, you might want to read the disclaimer. Before you even think about starting… The terms “Web 3.14159… ”, “Web Pi” and “Web ?” can be used interchangeably. It is irrational (just like “Web 2.0”), ubiquitous, widely celebrated and quite delicious. What’s this all about? Surely, all of you will be familiar with the term “Web 2.0”. Everybody seems to know something about it, be it analysts, journalists or any other profession that ends with “st”. Although the people at Wikipedia try to define the term “Web 2.0”, in my opinion, the term “Web 2.0” does not convey a sufficient depth. It can mean anything you want it to mean-perfect for post-modern philosophers, but problematic for users.
Additionally, there are some emerging trends of this whole “Web 2.0” thing that I deem to be potentially dangerous. 1. The rise of sites and services that are in a perpetual “Beta” status. This is nothing but a lame excuse to leave testing to the end users. Either give it a version number and accept that users might complain if something does not work or do not release the product for the general public at all. Hiding behind the “Beta” construct for a long period of time is a very, very bad way of treating users (because you cannot be held liable for any quirks; after all, it was declared “Beta”…). A slowly vanishing construct formerly known as “privacy”. In Web 2.0, everyone knows what you did last summer (because there are these photos, you know, uploaded by a well-meaning friend, you know, the guy you met at this party with, like, all the green hair and stuff). People tend to expose themselves without being aware of the consequences.
The idea that form is much more important than content. The very idea that, no matter how useless your product is, people will love it if it looks great and “Web 2.0”-like (whatever that means, but I am repeating myself). Storing everything online. Doing everything online. “XYZ as a service”. This leads to companies doing collaboration using products hosted by 3rd-party companies. The integrity of their data might be compromised (not to mention any backups), but who cares, as long as it works? In addition, it undermines fundamental concepts of IT security: If you store confidential documents on a server that is not your own, you will not be able to control their propagation. Vendor lock-in. You offer a great service but do not want to lose users (whether they are paying or not) to your competitors. So you make switching from your platform to another very hard. Suddenly, you do not wish to offer the service anymore.
Now your former users can say goodbye to your data. This is most annoying with DRM stuff. If only I got some small amount of money for every DRM project that died, leaving (paying!) customers standing there with next to nothing (read: useless data, unplayable music files) on their hard disks, I would be rich. All “cool” services must use some sort of creative spelling: flickr, tumblr. The notion that the more interesting a website is, the more scripts have to be used. “Technologies used on the website equal success”. For crying out loud, why do I have to use a broadband connection just to take a look at a table of products? Or a listing of your contact address? Or your support section? What can I do about it? It’s simple: Join the ranks of the “Web 3.14159… ” community! We condemn the lax usage of the term “Web 2.0”. We despise the use of unnecessary tools for a job.
We hate websites that demand more processing power and bandwidth than the whole LHC. We are on a parody crusade! Am I ready for this? ” community. If you think “I agree” about more than three of these statements, you should definitely sign up. Google might say “Don’t be evil”, but they are just as profit-oriented as every company. I would not trust them with all my data and I think that people who embrace the idea of using Google products for everything should think twice. Webmasters who use Flash for a simple website navigation without offering any alternatives should be shown the errors of their ways by forcing them to use Lynx on a 80x25 console for a week. Social network sites are a nice thing, but there is no need for an excessive soul striptease just because I can enter so many things about myself, upload photos of the things I do at parties and add the videos of me doing doing the photos of the things I do at parties.
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