The UI and user experience degrade by having applications running in the browser is not always worth the upgrade in being able to access your information from everywhere. Or put a bit more simply:

Web 2.0 is not worth it everytime.

I don’t want to upload my entire music collection to web2.0musicplayer.com to stream it back when I want to play it. It simply isn’t worth the bother. No one has suggested that as far as I am aware so far but that is an illustration of how it can be overdone. To me that example is clearly over the top, and I find some of the real Web 2.0 ideas to also be too much bother for not enough gain. You might be able to “get” it anywhere, but it is super fiddly to do so.

Take the idea of putting office applications online. For me this is very much on the border. For word processing I can just about see that it is a simple enough activity to mean the simpler interfaces are usable. You can word process with a glorified text area. The benefits of knowing that your documents are all safe, and not having to carry round a USB drive with them on mean for me they get the thumbs up. But spreadsheets is a whole other story. They are complicated things where you need to be able to enter formulae with confidence into the cells. I don’t really use many much, but when I do I need a complexity that is not matched online. I need to be able to drag formula to more cells, and for them to sensibly change to fit their new locations. I need to be able to write 1, 2, 3, in a column and drag them for a list of as many integers as I want. I don’t want to feel limited for space. And I need customisable charts and graphs. I havent seen an implementation that can give me this. So for a spreadsheet I would say no.

Since therefore you are going to have your spreadsheet files offline it makes sense to keep your documents with them. Which makes the word processing online option look less attractive. With your documents online you can also only get them when you are connected to the internet, unless you make a special arrangement to download them. This means that in that period of time when you lose connectivity not only can you not work on your document - but you can’t even read what you have done so far! I would say that all things considered “Web Office” is not ready yet for using. It is not worth it.

There is something similar with email. Email is now generally read in webmail services. They are hugely advantageous over using a non web based service as you can get your email from anywhere which is hugely important. The interface’s are never quite as good as what you get in a desktop client but this is overridden by the huge gain in accessibility. Most people though use 1 computer most of the time I think. Especially people with laptops. That is why I think it is best to use a desktop client hooked up to a decent webmail service for your email. You get the best interface there is for email in a very responsive desktop product, and you get access to your email from anywhere with a web connection too. That is an ideal solution.

Calendaring for me gets the same rating as the email issue. You need it everywhere, but the deaktop client’s are better. So you use standards to get a compromise. I broadcast my calendar up to a web service as well as having my web service’s calendar streaming into my desktop application. It isn’t a perfect sync situation. But I can add events and they will show up on both ends. And since most of the time I will be on my main computer I get the great experience that the web 2.0 version still can’t match.

So the ideals are: Office - No, Email & Calendaring - Half Way.

What about everything else Web 2.0? What about social networking? What about social bookmarking? They are both great uses of Web 2.0 technologies. They both get a big “yes”. They can’t and don’t exist without the internet. It doesn’t make sense to even ask this question about them.

My message is simple. Web 2.0 is cool, but not for everything. Not yet anyway.