Meet Breton, a very sens­ible bloke, who just pro­duced the most insight­ful com­ment I’ve ever read about Web 2.0. In a post on JeffCroft.com called “Web 2.0 != AJAX”, he said the following:

So… web 2.0 is about focus­ing on user exper­i­ence and best prac­tices? How is that dis­tinct from what a web designer is sup­posed to do any­way? Does it mat­ter what tools you accom­plish it with? Yeah it’s great that all this new tech­no­logy is avail­able now. But it doesn’t mean that people that weren’t thought­ful and skilled at usab­il­ity before, will sud­denly become amaz­ing design­ers thanks to all these lovely new frameworks.

It just seems like we’re all just excited about these new amaz­ing things we can do with JavaScript/Ruby/CSS that we come up with all these hypey buzzwords to make it seem access­ible to lay­men (and fail at that), and then drape it with a veil of legit­im­acy by try­ing to describe it as some­thing more, deeper, and newer, than just good design prac­tices com­bined with a good know­ledge of tech­no­logy.
~ source: Breton over at JeffCroft.com

He took the words out of my mouth he did.

Of course, the pur­pose of Jeff’s ini­tial post was to make clear that web 2.0 doesn’t mean Ajax. It doesn’t — but they’re both silly buzzwords nonetheless.