Has Web 2.0 gone 1.0 too far?
Posted on August 7, 2008 at 5:29 am
Wikipedia tell us that Web 2.0 is:
Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users. These concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies.
That all sounds mighty fine, collaboration is good, creativity is good, it’s all good up until the time you try and use a Web 2.0 site over a slow Internet connection. Let us not forget that the whole idea behind the HTTP protocol was to present data inside a thin client, using the least amount of network resources possible.
I spent almost a decade in the software development industry, and I can tell you that back then, we used to work to the lowest common denominator, the feature set for new software would be defined by requirements, not by what was funky, we had limited system resources available to us, so we made sure we did not waste any. I cannot help but believe that the average web designer these days just does not care that a large percentage of people around globe do not have the benefit of fat bandwidth broadband connections.
Facebook, possibly the granddaddy of all Web 2.0 sites, takes over 3 minutes to load the home page across my dial-up connection, do you think I actually bother using it? And I am not alone in my limited Internet connection, I know dozens of people who still have to use dial-up within a half mile radius of me right now.
A slow loading site is not a problem in itself, as long as the little status bar is moving and we have some way of knowing we are still waiting for data and it’s just a case of being patient right? Wrong! So many Web 2.0 sites have also included AJAX functionality into their pages, when AJAX is refreshing, the browser does nothing, no status display, no spinning icon, it just displays as a completed load until the AJAX update actually appears.
This means that for some sites, I am left sitting waiting for minutes at a time, with no actual visual indication that anything is actually happening at all, this is unacceptable.
Ok so this is a bit of a rant, but when did the software industry start putting visuals and style over plain old usability? I don’t care how pretty your website looks, if it takes me 10 minutes to login, 8 of which I sit with my fingers crossed hoping my connection hasn’t hung, with no way of knowing if anything is happening, I am just not going to use your site.
You may have heard the old K.I.S.S adage, Keep It Simple Stupid, this had been a mantra for software developers for several decades, which now seems to have been thrown out of the window by this “brave new world” of Web 2.0. Quite frankly, if something can be done in flat HTML, why do it any other way?
When developers started rolling out flash enabled sites several years ago, they were polite enough to give low bandwidth visitors a non-flash site as an option, not so with Web 2.0 sites.
So what do you think? Is good looking better than usable? Would you rather have cool features you will never used instead of a responsive and robust browsing experience? I know which I prefer.
This is a guest post by Mac Wheeler, who currently lives and works in Thailand.
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I wholeheartedly agree; unfortunately though, fluff and the Joneses has become a mainstay of American (at least) culture. What bothers me just as much is Microsoft’s policy on activeX & Silverlight … the user can globally allow, disallow, or permit prompting of such, but cannot selectively set permissions (no to 3rd party, always for suchsuch.com) for sites.
To be honest, I can’t think of a single person I know who still uses dial up internet, just as I haven’t seen advertisements for the service for a number of years now, and that’s in Australia, and we have pretty shocking internet services.
I would assume anyone still using dial-up would most likely have little internet in web 2.0 type websites, and therefore it would not be too much of an issue.
However I do there should be more of a focus on making sites smaller and load faster, if just to save bandwidth somewhat.