Rising Trends in Web 2.0

Nov-10-05, 3:48 am by Hanford
File under: web2.0, Trends

I still cringe when I hear "web 2.o" thrown about. I completely buy into what it stands for, and where it's going, but I believe the label is hype,because I don't see many aspects of Web 2.0 as being new. Perhaps it's because I've been running a web forum for a few years now. But I'm off-track, perhaps another post.

Here's a list of a few web2.0 trends I've spotted these days:

Missing VowelsBoy, vowels must be selling for a premium these days, since they seem to be missing from a handful of Web 2.0 sites.

Citations: Flickr, Frappr, not to mention the hipper-than-thou phones at Motorola: The RAZR, PEBL, and ROKR.

Vanilla DesignI think Google popularized the trend of no-frills websites as a "cool" thing, but the Web 2.0 version of the vanilla website seems to use a little more CSS than Google.

Citations: Wordpress, Flock
Multi-sized type
The trend is to post a series of words or phrases in different point sizes. This looks very amateurish to me, like something I did when I first used the GEOS word processor in the mid 80s-- more WYSIWYG1.0 than Web2.0. I spotted it on the Flock preview page as well, but it seems to be gone now.

Citation: Wordpress forums, Ning near the bottom.

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Hanford wrote: Nov-10-05, 2:52 pm

Re: multi-sized lettering

When I first saw it on Ning I wondered if it had something to do with it's popularity, but it's not entirely obvious. When Flock had it on their homepage, it was for static text, so it definitely was not for any particular reason.

Humuhumu wrote: Nov-10-05, 12:20 pm

I hear you, re: the hype. My approach is to keep an eye on the tools, and try 'em out if they're interesting, but especially if they actually make some [i]sense[/i]. At they end of the day, if they don't really help me learn more about the things I love, or get the word out to those who share my interests, then... meh. Move on. I try to not be attracted to an idea because of the buzz, but I also try to not be turned off by it, too.

Re: the multi-sized lettering -- I agree that it's amateurish, but you know that it's not arbitrary, right? A number of websites have done it, as you mention -- typically, they're tags, and the larger ones have more information, or more traffic -- it's a way of displaying as many different tags as possible, while making those that are likely to be of the most interest stand out a bit. Again -- amateurish -- but at least they're playing around with different ways of displaying rich(ish) data in a simple, instantly-grasped form.

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