Web guru Jeffrey Zeldman examines the “Web 2.0” hype that threatens to overwhelm some of the legitimate advances in rich application development for the web in his article Web 3.0 at A List Apart, noting that it’s hard to map out AJAX interactions and putting the bubblicious flavor of the hype in context with this parable:
Steven, a young web wiz, has just celebrated his bar mitzvah. He received a dozen gifts and must write a dozen thank-you notes. Being webbish, he creates an on-line ÒThank-You Note Generator.Ó Steven shows the site to his friends, who show it to their friends, and soon the site is getting traffic from recipients of all sorts of gifts, not just bar mitzvah stuff. If Steven created the site with CGI and Perl and used tables for layout, this is the story of a boy who made a website for his own amusement, perhaps gaining social points in the process. He might even contribute to a SXSW Interactive panel.
