Keith H
Established Online Marketing Professional (SEO, PPC, Link Building, PR, Content Creation, Web Analytics)
How do you Define Web 2.0?
It seems there are alot of definitions about Web 2.0 throughout the industry. Even Tim O'Reilly in his piece "What is Web 2.0" (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html) seems to have changed the definition of Web 2.0 as it have evolved with time.
In your opinion how do you define Web 2.0 and do you think this is a static definition or something that is more dynamic and really should be called Web 2x? What will trigger Web 2.1, 2.1.1, 2.5 etc?
Answers (15)
Most Web 2.0 debates I've seen revolve around two concepts: 1. Community and 2. Interactivity. Interesting though is that the 'community' has decided they would like the term to refer to interactivity rather than the O'Reilly definition. If there are to be future revisions of Web X.0, my guess is that the community will adapt the definition to what they feel is the most exciting new aspect of the web.
Robert F
Independent Business Owner(IBO) with Amway/Quixtar
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I think that Web 2.0 is just getting into it's own and that the definition is too dynamic to pin down ... it is more of a driving force than a definition. It pushes the boundaries and is the catalyst for this change.
My simplistic view of "Web 2.0" can be summed up with 2 concepts: 1) beta - it's always in flux, iterating quickly and reacting to the needs/demands of the community, and 2) "user generated content". This can be through actual user submitted content (like videos posted to YouTube) or even as simple comments on a blog or posts on a forum. Web 2.0 is about helping people connect to one another to share ideas and information and evolving as quickly as necessary to keep the flow going.
I think Web 2.0 is neither technology (ajax & stuff) nor content concepts (community, user generated content).
It's the change in thinking towards "yes, we can do it" similar to the thinking before the first .com-bubble. More people dare to start a business, more people try out services.
Web 1.0 was defined by information accessiblity.
Web 2.0 is defined by interactivity, social networking, and user generated content. Myspace.com, flickr.com, blogs, wikipedia.com are notable examples.
Web 3.0, aka the "Semantic Web" is still being defined, but it is my belief that we will be defined by the semantic relationships of the Internet, the surfer-defined web. Here are some examples.
Instead of a static site navigation tree, users will be able to navigate sites with trees created dynamically based on how other users enter the site and click around. The navigation becomes self updating and based on real world usage.
News sites will be self updating based on people's interest and click patterns. You will be able to immediately see which stories were popular, ranked high, written well, seeing a lot of traffic, or all of the above, because their links were highlighted based on real time traffic patterns and approval ratings.
In search results, if everyone is clicking on the 5th result for a particular term, that term will become the 1st result for that term. In real time. Search results will include the top 3 referring pages in the results, so you can see how people are arriving at the page.
News sites will be able to predict the news of tomorrow based on search patterns. Yahoo is already able to predict American Idol winners based on the names that people search on.
There is so much data available about the internet based on how real people are using it. Early attempts to capture this by sites like Digg are admirable, but there is so much more that we can do.
Web 3.0 will be defined by how intelligently we can tap into this data to make it better - creating relationships that know one could have predicted.
Web 4.0. No one knows. Seth Godin took a pretty good stab at it (see attached link).
Links:
Personally, I think that "Web 2.0" was just the product of "the perfect storm" of fads. We saw graphic design cliches begin to rot at precisely the same time people realized that AJAX-EVERYTHING probably wasn't/isn't' the best way to design your application. The evolution of web applications needs no numbering. We just found ourselves at a particularly strange time, especially for this relatively young medium.
Web 2.0 is the web as a computing platform like Windows or Java. A good example of this is Google Apps. The key ingredient to making this work is AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML), though others are coming along, like W3C's Xforms and Adobe's Apollo. Web 2.0 allows the user to do real, meaningful work, just like the stuff we now do on Windows or UNIX boxes, but without the platform dependence. The browser is the user platform and the server platform is transparent.
All the other stuff extolled for Web 2.0 is implied from this, but isn't a requirement. As Web 2.0 is by its nature client-server, every client-server app on the web tends to get pulled under the Web 2.0 heading. Flickr is often touted as a Web 2.0 app, but it isn't; the data uploaded there cannot be manipulated, just showed around and commented on. Wikipedia is likewise branded, but again, it isn't; such a system could have been built by a dedicated dial-up bulletin board operator decades ago.
Cooperative sites have existed since WAIS, publicly accessible databases since gopher, and social networking since finger. Web 2.0 is none of these things, though they are often seen as a result of it. What is truly implied by Web 2.0 is a responsive client server interface that is defined by the connection, not the boxes on either end.
See the O'Reilly article for a counterpoint to this.
Links:
Chris W
Owner at The Wireless Man
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My personal opinion is that web 2.0 should never have been called web 2.0 - I personally hate 'versioning' titles when it's not the norm - software, by all means - but something as fluid and evolutionary as the web - come on!
I know Tim is the 'namer' here and no disrespect but since he called it web 2.0 it seems that everyone is using it and using it badly, incorrectly, to mean different things, to mean whatever they think it is....
Mostly is a good way to get someone to understand reasonable what their site does - if they said web site - it's like, 'so what' - if they say I gotta web 2.0 thing happening - it's like, 'really, cool, what's it all about?'
i love to hear people define web 3.0 and web 4.0 and even web 5.0 - but I'll stay well away from them and the future versioning of it.
What's next? Life 2.0?
This is why Jake 2.0 was cancelled! LOL
:-)
Chris I wrote about Web 4.0, just for you. Honestly. (http://tinyurl.com/27fd7o) Labels such as "web 2.0" obviously indulge in the cheese factor but they also provide us with organizing concepts, however ambiguous such concepts may be. In fact I'd argue that the ambiguity surrounding "web 2.0" (e.g., for every person there seems to be a different definition for the term) is a strength.
The web 2.0 conference showed that there are a lot of followers in the web 2.0 culture but few leaders. The degree of ambiguity could be dueto the simple lack of grand visions architected under the auspices of the term.
Web 2.0 marks the beginning of a web shift away from horizontally-oriented technologies and towards vertically-oriented solutions. Tools are getting better and better matched to specific contexts. We're also starting to see the beginning of a maturation process with the use of user behavior data, social network data, semantics, ontologies.
I'm not sure versioning web 2.0 at 2.1, 2.2, etc., makes much sense. Web 2.0 is a term for describing the view from 10,000 feet, however interesting or uninformative the term may be.
Links:
I think that Web 2.0 is more a marketing term than matter of technology. The prime feature of web 2.0 applications is advanced interactivity plus advanced technology (well, not superior yet... Let's wait for XHTML 2.0, desktop gadgets and other sweet things boom). It is based on 10-year old technologies (poor hypertext language - HTML; XMLHttpRequest invented by Microsoft; sessionless HTTP protocol;), so it is not a software technology breakthrough. In my opinion, it is a change in user minds driven by spread of broadband connections: more people, bigger markets, more diversity - and the Web looks different than 10 years before. An here is the actual meaning of "2.0" message: "Web(We) has(have) changed. No more failing dotcoms, more professionalism, more success, more income." Not sure if this is really true, however :)
Catherine S
R&D Engineer
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In one study, seven topics were gathered and looked at under the label Web 2.0 :
- RSS
- blogs
- wikis (with wikipedia as a reference, for collaborative editing)
- peer to peer
- collective intelligence
- social networking
- forget the last one.
I will add the URL, tomorrow.
Links:
Clarification added April 27, 2007:
Last one is Mash-up.
Below a link to a study, "How businesses are using Web 2.0:" A McKinsey Global Survey, it is free but registration is required.
Catherine
Ed L
Learning and Web Professional
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I have a simple definition:
Web 2.0 is the development of business models around web technologies and trends that have emerged since the burst of the dot-com bubble.
There's a LOT of interesting stuff in those trends and technology, so I don't mean to minimize the impact of user-generated content or the wisdom of crowds or Ajax or whatever else, but the one thing that puts it all under the same umbrella is monetization.
Philosopical answer: Web 2.0 is a marketing and hype word for what we'll be talking about until the next real revolution in networked computing happens. At that point, suddenly user agents (i.e. PCs, operating systems, and browers) will have some new way of sharing information that everyone uses, and it may well be called something different.
Technically, Web 2.0 tends to mean web-based applications that are much more shareable, interactive, and user-driven than in the past. Yahoo Pipes is an excellent example (not that there aren't a million other good examples!).
Everyone has a website with content (blogs, newspapers, banks, whatever). Yahoo Pipes now allows a user - without technical expertise, and without paying for a server or other resource of their own - to create their own application, which is based on multiple other applications out there. That's the interactivity, and the abiilty for users to create mashups and the like, which separates 2.0 from 1.0 Web era.
The "Semantic Web" is vaugely related to Web 2.0, but only geeks really care about it right now; the average human doesn't know or care what it means, which is just fine. We're still waiting for the day when computers actually just do what people want, rather than having to learn how to make a computer do what people want.
Not technical razzle-dazzle but the sheer aesthetic superiority of its elegant parabolic design make the GFX-100 a Marketing Breakthough!
(From the advertisement for a TV "dish" antenna)
Web 2.0 is whatever some company's marketing department wants to claim it is today. Tomorrow it might be something else.
Links:
Babu M
Development Architect at Cox Communications
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you want a one line answer ?
"It is not that what you know, It is that who you know" ?!?!
