Designing, keeping users in mind has been evolving over a period of time and as you have rightly put, designing for the people, yes that is going to be the key facet of the future web apps.

Users on the web have evolved from an email to search to blogging and it is this amazing demand for Information in different shapes and sizes that is going to define the future of the web.

Am really pleased be a part of this amazing metamorphosis.

Is Web 2.0 getting boring? Don't get me wrong - I love and use some of the tools from the Web 2.0 era every day.

del.icio.us enables me to file away stuff I might need in future and find helpful tech resources (with better results than Google). I have bursts of using Flickr, Last.fm, co.mments. After trying a tonne of different online feed readers with "cutting edge features," I went back to Bloglines. I've found Basecamp invaluable for keeping organised. I sometimes point people over to PXN8 or Pixoh if they don't have an image editing program on their computer.

But reading TechCrunch, Mashable and so on has lately become less exciting for me. The Web 2.0 list is massive - and there are many people bringing out similar sites and services.

Sometimes I wonder if there's a better system out there than the one I'm using for a particular task (e.g. social bookmarking) and I'll go looking and try out a new system. Either I don't give it enough time to realise the benefits, or I don't need all those extra benefits or I'm too entrenched in the simplicity of the tool I currently use.

Being bombarded with new sites and services constantly (if you're a subscriber to quite a few Web 2.0 sites) might actually be less beneficial. Sometimes there's nothing like word of mouth from people who've become converts to the system, rather than people just reviewing them. The true test of the value of one of these sites is it becomes part of your life, your habits. We can all be wowed by features the first time we meet them, but are they actually beneficial?

> "We need to embrace problem solving, not
> just visual problems either. We need to
> embrace the history of design - the craft
> of design - in order to understand the
> rules behind the aesthtic stuff we've been
> doing all these years. When we do, we'll
> find that these rules have been based on
> solving problems - not on how things look, > but how they work."

100% Correct. Design, traditionally - before it became aesthetics, is was associated with solving problems. Even interior designers do this (see Joel Spolksy's office, everyone gets 2 windows! even the cubes). On the web there are lots of problems. A while back updating content vs updating appearance, hence semantic HTML and CSS. After that, people don't even know what their looking at or how to use it, hence usability and IA. Now, applications are not responsive, hence XMLHTTPRequest. Next, managing all of that and streamlining it easily so it doesn't break every time we change something! Oh yea, and mobile too...(the mobile series has been very informative over at Authentic Boredom)

>> "Web 2.0" is all the thing at the moment.
>> Silly, silly name if you ask me.

But is there a *better* one?

|| We are on the cusp of something here. I can smell it. ||

Amen to that! "Rich media" rocks.