Apple Doesn't Get Web 2.0

There have been a couple of posts since Apple's press event on Tuesday, which saw the launch of the new .Mac Galleries - an online, read-only version of iPhoto, kind of - that state that "Apple doesn't get the web". Jeremy Keith says

in the fast-moving, messy world of online services I don’t think the genius-led design of Apple can compete with the truckloads of nimble young upstarts making snazzily addictive products on the Web

and Chris Heathcote writes

Whenever Apple strays towards software and the web recently, there’s a lot of flashy interfaces, and little substance.

I think there's a slight qualification to be made here. I think Apple are great at web publishing. Their site is one of the best product sites I've seen (despite the fact I dislike the new bigger-than-800-pixel width). I've been going on about the elegance of URLs - it's possible to guess that there's something at apple.com/keyboard, for example - since 2001 or something, and even when they drop in AJAX their pages still have usable permanent links.

When designing for consumers, Apple takes the same approach. They produce tools for publishing, using a one-to-many, one-direction mode of thinking. As James Duncan Davidson notes as he writes about the .Mac galleries, "It’s not Flickr, and comparing it to Flickr is probably pointless." Well, no. Flickr is the archetypal Web 2.0 application, being almost as much about community as about photographs themselves. The .Mac gallery, on the other hand, is all about putting your work online. There's no comments, no notes, no tags, but the people who it's aimed at don't want that. They're about publishing, not interaction, and while they pages are undoubtedly heavy, and probably scale badly, they're also slick enough that a lot of people will like them.

Similarly, iWeb-generated blogs have no comments, but well-designed templates (from which it's hard to stray.)* Again, it's designed for publishing. The problem for Apple is that it's not 1999 any more. People expect more from their sites now, and thankfully more and more of the sites I use are applications, not brochureware. So perhaps the statement needs to be refined, because despite the JavaScript libraries and slick visuals, Apple doesn't get Web 2.0.

* One point where iWeb fails is that it doesn't preserve Apple's nice URLs; the ones it generates are distinctly ugly. At least, they were in the first version.