Lately I’ve been getting an awful lot of requests for ‘Web 2.0′ features. I’ve always hated the term for a number of reasons.

Web 2.0 was supposed to mark a paradigm shift in the way web sites operated. It promised interactivity and community in an age where sites were static. While we certainly see more of that these days, you also have to remember that these philosophies have been central to the web for many, many years. Amazon was founded in 1994 and Ebay in 1995, and both sites heavily featured user-generated content, even in the early days. In fact Tim Berners Lee described Web 2.0 as:

…people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.

Certainly, there’s a look and feel associated with Web 2.0, largely dictated by emerging technologies and limitations of the day. Some of the most representative Web 2.0 technologies, Javascript (created in 1995) and AJAX (1999) have been around for over a decade now. In Interweb years, that’s an age! In fact, a lot of what was erroneously described as AJAX was simply good ol’ fashioned DHTML, re-packaged and re-branded for a new audience.

My biggest beef with Web 2.0 is that it’s frequently used as just another point on the checklist of requests, without any thought as to what such features actually are, or whether they’re appropriate for the site and audience. As in, “we need the site to be usable, accessible and Web 2.0″. As such, the term is completely meaningless! Much better to find out from your users what features they actually need, and go from there.

I’ve even been asked if I can “do” Web 2.0. I usually answer that any features are possible given the right budget. Whether or not you want to give them a label of Web 2.0 is up to you!

I guess the take home message for this article is exactly as the title of this article says: stop paying lip service to a marketing term, find out what your users really need, and implement it.

As I mentioned before, I made the switch to GNU/Linux at home some time ago. I talked about the benefits it brought me in terms of PC performance and productivity.

But at work, I’m still firmly rooted in the Windows camp. Why? Primarily because my job involves developing web sites and apps.

Tracking browser usage is a notoriously haphazard affair. According to the much-quoted W3C schools statistics, roughly 53% of users are using Internet Explorer. According to wikipedia, that number is nearly 75%.

Given internet explorer’s ‘unusual’ implementation of web standards – not to mention its market share – it is a necessity to test on these browsers. This is where things get a bit tricky for users of minority operating systems such as Linux, or OSX.

Sure, there are services such as Browsershots which take snapshots of sites using particular browsers, but if you’re anything like me, developing for IE is an iterative process. Make a change, hit refresh. Make a change, hit refresh. Waiting 3-30 minutes to see an update isn’t an option!

I’d be interested to hear comments from anyone who has found a way round this issue.