When Someone Tells You About The Next Web, Hold Your Wallet

Peter Merholz, whose writing I seem to miss a lot these days, revisits his famous old pasture of desire lines—paths people wear into the grass because that’s just where they want to go. A canny writer, Merholz saves his best point for the last, “one more thing” bullet:

• It intrigued me that though this event was about the “next web”, it felt very much to be about figuring out the current Web. Considering how many blowhards have dismissed the Web as a solved problem, the conversation among these very smart people suggested it is anything but.

This is really too charitable. It's all just the Web. There was no Web 2.0. What we call Web 2.0 is mostly marketing copy grafted onto better software engineering (AJAX, CSS) and a new visual style (big fonts, reflections). When conference speakers show you graphs of Web 3.0 and Web 4.0 and whatnot, they are hucksters blowing smoke.

It’s the Web.