I recall Phil saying I was “all about the 2.0″. And I still am, in that I think the New Web needs to be about real community if you’re going to profess that your site is a Community Website. With the increasingly common use of the term “Web 3.0″ (usually taken to mean The Semantic Web) in The Valley and similar bleeding-edge places, and “Web 4.0″ (both serious and satirical) the danger is that we’ll find, like Microsoft did with its software, that the version numbers soon get a little silly.

Their answer was to use years instead (Office 2003 etc.), but the answer for the Web is not to use artificial version numbers at all. It’s not as if there is anything fundamentally different, technologically, between the so-called “Web 1.0″ and “Web 2.0″. It was always meant to be a state of mind or a way of seeing the Web experience, not a particular technology. Web 2.0 (or the concept meant by it) is any, all or none of the following:

• Ajax / rich interfaces / RIAs
• Blogs
• Wikis
• Social networking sites, like MySpace, Facebook etc.
• User-generated content (YouTube etc.)
• Forums (though these are as old as the hills)
• New things that almost defy description (Twitter)
• “Communities” (however you define them)
• Mashups, APIs and easily-linked resources

The trouble is that you can ask ten different people “what is Web 2.0?” and you’ll likely get ten different answers, possibly including some of the above list.

I do believe that Tim O’Reilly couldn’t have predicted what the monster he created has become, and the term was actually useful in 2003 to get a handle on the ways in which newer Web sites differed from old ones. But that time has passed, and the term “Web 2.0″ (and all succeeding x.0 versions) needs to be retired. Now.

I just wonder whether Twitter has reached a natural end. You know “it was fun while it lasted” sort of thing. And it was fun, until relatively recently. Then the number of “spam” followers increased, thanks to the ease of scripting against the API, no doubt; on the other hand, the API also allowed fantastic tools like the Twitter Twerp Scanner to me made, so I don’t think Twitter shouldn’t have an API.

With or without an API, the problem with Twitter (as has been said numerous times) is that it doesn’t scale. It’s a centralised (if clustered) service unlike email, blogs or Plain ol’ Websites, which can exist anywhere and conform (roughly) to a standard. To Tweet, you must Be On Twitter. This is its fatal flaw while being central to the way it works. Mike Arrington wrote on Techcrunch a while ago on how Twitter might be decentralised.

Twitter: a highly-addictive social experiment that just goes to show, by counter-example, the merits of decentralisation.

Fast forward to 2007. Three has the best-value data packages of the UK mobile operators: £2.50 per month for 10MB of data, which is plenty for mobile e-mail and the odd bit of Twittering and Mobile Facebooking. You can get “unlimited” (actually 1GB fair use) for £5/month, but that’s overkill for me. It’s the same price as ten train times lookups via the official, paid-for service on Planet Three, so in those terms: why not?

Well, it’s a good job that Three’s 3G coverage is patchy near our house. I do find that I don’t want to miss anything on Twitter, especially, while mobile GMail is a strange mix of regular email, commercial marketing that I have signed up for, and mailing lists. The latter, like Twitter, plug me in to online community to such an extent that I find it hard to resist continuously checking for replies and new conversations.

Perhaps I’m filling a void because I don’t get out much IRL. Hey, having just had another baby, I don’t have the chance to get out much! My evenings are mostly cook (unless Kathy’s done that), eat, clear up, do some housework, rock Abi to sleep and then go to bed – preferably early so I don’t feel the effects of broken nights too much.

Online community is most of the community I get at the moment.