Beyond the Buzz Words of Web 2.0 - SaaS Week

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March 17, 2008
Beyond the Buzz Words of Web 2.0

CMS Wire has a great post about how people often don't understand the meaning of Web 2.0 technologies beyond having heard buzz words.

Marisa Peacock points to how clients often request Web 2.0 technologies to be built into a website without understanding what they are asking for. She suggests that it is more important to understand the underlying technologies than the buzz words, concluding:

After awhile, everything sounds the same and the wrong words get used and misunderstandings arise.

Do you feel that there are too many buzz words in SaaS and Web 2.0? I tend to think so. I'm somewhat interested in posts about this topic, in part because of being a technology editor by profession for a number of years, and it's often seemed to me that most of the buzz words are invented by marketers and widely used by people who don't understand them. In many cases, use of complex buzz words and acronyms can make even the most mundane of technologies sound like something incomprehensible. And this is then what leads to people not understanding the difference between SaaS, SOA, and Web 2.0 and all that stuff -- even if the underlying technologies are different, people's eyes glaze over with the TLAs and buzz words start coming out. It seems like the K.I.S.S. principle ought to apply. A little simplicity might go a long way.

And with that, don't forget that if you're interested in SOA and Web 2.0, ebizQ is having a roundtable discussion on Wednesday that you won't want to miss.