Over the past week or two, you'd have noticed Avatar's obsession with fixing people's nomenclatures over at Bloggeratto. Personally, I really don't see what the big deal is. I can think of so many words and labels (or tags (or categories)) that were given to sites and certain aspects of Web 2.0 which have become redundant since then. Things like bookmarking, social, community or sharing have all been replaced with Web 2.0. People still call them by what they used to call them before, or just give them the common label of being 'Web 2.0-ish'. I know all those things mentioned in the 3-4 posts at Bloggeratto aim to clear the doubts, but what we sometimes don't realise that it really doesn't make a difference to people as long their point goes through.

The common surfer couldn't care less to delve into specifics. He just looks for buzz words like AJAX. They'll, as they say, go with the flow just to be one with the crowd. Everything on the internet works in booms, not so much with bubbles. See what happened with the concept of a personalised Homepage (started by Google, if I'm not wrong) came into existence. Startups ran helter skelter to get one up and running. The only one worth mentioning 2-3 months after that remains Netvibes, with the latest being the collapse of Fold.com. So how does it matter what one calls them?

The more we try to seperate, the more we confuse people. In a place like the internet, we can draw the analogy to The Matrix. A very geeky thing to do, I know, but if you see, you'll notice that there are mainly 3 types of people. Those who know exactly whats going on and see the tide shift this way and that, ala the people who've been freed. The second types are the ones who sense that something is happening, but they can't put their finger on it yet, ala what Neo was before finally meeting Morpheus. And finally, the utterly clueless who do / go about their daily routines, oblivious to whats happening because either they don't consider it their business, or they just don't want to know about it, and they are the still plugged in slaves, being used to power the machines. The second type make up a very small group of people, with the majority being the third kinds. The first kinds are the so-called power users and they are somewhere in between, but not such a large number.

That being pulled as the analogy. It'll be easy for you to see how many aspects of the internet really don't matter to the majority. Slowly and steadily, people are waking up to what the net can really do for them. But unless a sizeable number of people form that group, all these fights between browsers, nomenclatures, startups etc. are fruitless, because the whole idea of Web 2.0 is people. The whole concept of Web 2.0 is to be driven by people. Unfortunately the people themselves aren't ready for such a revolution, but they slowly are seeing the light. So, let's save these debates for a time when people really can put up a proper argument! :-P

[Link]: This post veers in and out of the broad topic touched by this post, so I thought I'd link it here! (Crash of the Web 2.0 titans)