Is Web 2.0 with usability or not?

BBC quotes Jakob Nielsen, while he says, basicly, that Web 2.0 is with a creepy lack of usability. People are more interested in doing fancy things than actualy making them work well. And... Not only I agree with him, but also am having this discussion with several people in the Web 2.0 world for more than two years. Of course that telling this also pisses a lot of people, and we got a R/WW post saying basicly, that none of that is true, and that Web 2.0 has a lot of usability. I'm sorry, I'm not going to use this space to bash anyone, to talk about who's right and wrong or doing publicity to 37signals. I'm just going to pick some examples to show what I mean with lack of usability.

1. Have you ever tried to post a comment in TechCrunch using Opera Mini? Well, you can't...
2. ...which reminds me the whole issue of "mobile versions" and "mobile portals". When you need to do a web version of your web application to run in some browsers (mobile or not), you sure usability problems. Remember, a mobile device is also a computer with an web browser.
3. YouTube was a given example of usability by R/WW. Excuse me? IMHO the only way you can use YouTube in any Operating System besides Windows, Mac OS, Linux and Solaris (like any BSD, for instance) is by downloading the video (using something like youtube-dl or a GreaseMonkey script), since it heavily depends on Adobe Flash, which licence does not permit its use in any Operating System other than those refered above;
4. XHR. You know? XMLHttpRequest, that thingie most use in an AJAX implementation. While I think there are great things that are achieved with this, XHR is still NOT a standard (see status and help changing it), and so several web browsers does not support it. Using it is taking usability off your web application.
   
5. Another example of bad usability is taken from an example of "good usability" given on R/WW: NetVibes. You say they have great usability, but their website says:

   We currently support Mozilla Firefox 1+, Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Opera 9.02, Safari 2+.
   

   I'm sorry, but if you only support some web browers, then you do not have usability.
   

Now, I could be hours ranting about this, but I think that it's kind of useless. People are still exited with Web 2.0, so excited that they don't really care. And while they don't care, you can tell them whatever that they won't listen to you.

If you're a Web 2.0 developer and really care about usability, please, PLEASE, prove me wrong. I would love to see, for instance, more people working with W3C.

Predicting the tech-future

Following my yesterday's post about predictions of the tech-future (one predicted a Dystopian world controlled by Linden Labs in 2016, the other an overall controll of the tech-world by Google in 2017), now here's a link to an article talking about an upcoming paper that represents the result of a summit and they will "define/predict" a "metaverse roadmap". Yes, I know, having a bunch of folks in the industry "decide" a roadmap for such a thing is, well... ahem, anyway, the article is quite interesting, and gives us some food for thoughts. They predict that we'll have such a world and metaverse (first self, second self and mixed self) in 10 years from now (2017). They think that the upcoming tech-world is going to have four basic metaverse kinds:

• dubbed augmented reality
• lifelogging
• virtual worlds
• mirror worlds

For starts, I really don't think that you can apply the world metaverse for any of those items but the third: virtual worlds. The concept of metaverse appeared with the excelent book "Snow Crash", and defines a Virtual World with certain characteristics, but it is a virtual world.

But let's talk about those four items there.

Dubbed augmented reality is a concept where technology enables you to have an allways-persent body-widget that lets you know more about the reality that envolves you. Think about Plazes on steroids, in a allways-present device (like the eye-screening we see on GiTS), that enables you to have any kind of info about where you are, realtime. You can enhance the concept and think about stuff like getting info about people as you look at them and that sort of stuff. Possible? Yes, even probable, but that isn't a Metaverse, it makes me recall more other aspects in Snow Crash...

Like lifelogging. Remember that guys on Snow Crash that did something like wearing a full-body gadget-suit that was used to stream images into the future version of YouTube? Well, consider that lifeblogging with a little of the previous item (correlation between video footage and the people in that footage, and stuff like that).

On virtual worlds, it seems that what's been talked is about a more immersive version of Second Life, as the previous predictions also talked about. On a side note, while the previous prediction talked about Linden Labs (the company behind Second Life) buying google, in this event the general ideas were on whether would Google create GoogleOS and Microsoft would buy Linden Labs, positioning Google as the developing mega-softwarehouse with the future of Operating Systems, and Microsoft as less a technological company and more like a big pocket of money available to investiment, which isn't really surprising if you notice that we have really nothing innovative from Microsoft for years (the Wow from Vista is a big pile of FUD about a defective Operating System with nothing innovative compared to the alternatives). I intend to write soon more about my own visions of the future of Virtual Worlds real soon. And no, I don't believe that Second Life will turn into the "final and perfect VW", as much as I don't think that WOW (not Vista's Wow but World of Warcraft) is to be the ultimate MMORPG. Oh, and the nobody-knows-what-this-is extremely-hiped areae isn't going to have persistence, which is a big no-no for me (even if I usually agree with his vision on VW's.

Last but not least mirror worlds, which makes me remembers this list of Games on Google Maps. Mirror worlds are defined as virtual worlds like ours, with places like ours: a real representation of the "first world" but where people are only virtually, without meshing virtual with real people. I really don't see this happening unless you're trying to do something like Idlewild.

The final article is yet to be released, but I'll surelly be a reader of it.

MyToons

Still buggy, MyToons came out of beta today. What's MyToons? Basicly a website in the likes of YouTube, but only with non-x-rated animations. From their website:

MyToons.com is the world's greatest online animation community. It's the place where people who really love animation - from seasoned industry pros to rabid animation fans - can upload and share their creations and animated favorites with the entire world for free. There are so many exciting things to do and see it's hard not to have fun.

Technicly it could be way better, but it has the advantage that, at least for now, the garbage ratio is low. If you have some time to spend and like animations, this website might soon be your homepage.