The Age Old Question...What is Web 2.0?
A common question keeps surfacing across the blogosphere...What is Web 2.0? I keep reading more and more articles with more and more definitions. I was at a regional event a few weeks ago regarding Web 2.0 and its meaning. There were four different presenters with four different answers or variations of the meaning. Even Tim O'Reilly who coined the term has a hard time giving a definition. I have found there is no definitive answer. Why? Because Web 2.0 is changing daily. At this point, it's as if Tim O'Reilly started the game "telephone" in 2005 with the words "Web 2.0 Conference". By Tim O'Reilly simply needing a name to call his upcoming conference, it has spurred ample debates and personal opinions of what this all means.
Truthfully, I do not understand why we are all trying so hard to explain something that seems very obvious to me. If this blog was more focused on technology rather than marketing, then perhaps we could have called this the New Web Technology. There's a shift that is occurring and has been for some time. Web 2.0 is no more than an upgrade. It's not dissimilar to the Apple I to Apple II upgrade in the '70s. There is one distinct difference. The web is a collective upgrade of technology - unowned by any one entity. This is where the difficulty of defining the term begins.
Everyone has an opinion. You can read on and on about this topic. I don't want to be like everyone else and give you my own, but that's what a blog is for...right? Here's my explanation from two perspectives; Developers and Marketers.
Developer:
Web 2.0 is the next generation of Internet platforms that is based on collaborative environments where users are able to generate their own content, tag other’s content, and share content including pictures, videos, and games.
Marketer:
Web 2.0 is the next generation of Internet platforms that expands the Internet to a more shared environment where users spend more time on community like sites which in turn does the following:
Allows users to:
- Generate their own content
- Share files
- Develop communities
- Allows businesses to:
- Increase unique visitors by way of attraction (usually a useful tool or community)
- Increase unique visitors virally (both through trends meaning “everyone does it” and usefulness)
- Most importantly, increase monetization through:
- Additional unique visitors and impressions (advertising and subscriptions)
- Highly “sticky” sites where visitors are spending a lot of time interfacing with the tool or site such as Myspace (advertising and subscriptions)
If you were to accept this explanations, then I would say Web 2.0 started when P2P was introduced, and the sharing of music files. Once this began and open source became more common, it opened the flood gates of unorthodox developers becoming more, dare I say, creative. It showed that developers are becoming more savvy with developing useful and creative applications, i.e. Napster, Google, Myspace, Flickr, etc. Once the technology was born, i.e. RSS, Blogging, P2P (peer to peer), AJAX, it progressed into what we know today of being the new web. Here’s a great article from ClickZ that helps sum things up: http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3559851
Also, Dion Hinchcliffe's Web 2.0 blog is also a great resource for more information:
http://web2.wsj2.com/web2ishere.htm
I am enjoying all the debate and shared opinions. I think it's great for web. I love that more investors are coming back to the web after the dotcom era. It would be hard not to after what Myspace and Youtube were bought for.
Things are going well with Web 2.0. Whether people fully understand it, or have a clear idea of the meaning. This time I hope the bubble grows with rubber rather than Bubbleicious.
