The Web Versioning genie needs to be re-bottled
Today I got embroiled in a debate with Pete and Brian on Twitter about the term Web 2.0 and its increasing meaninglessness. This was only a few days after jumping on an old school friend’s use of the term, citing ReadWriteWeb’s …There is only the Web_is_no_web_30_there_is_no_web_20.php.
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_debate_on_web_future.php and satirical.php/2006/03/23/web-40-coming-to-an-internet-near-you/) 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.