What matters 2.0
Tim Bray
in a post entitled What Matters: "Every day that goes by I believe more
and more that the only important new thing is that the Net is read-write.
Everything that matters follows from that."
I came across this the same day that I noticed a new round of 'defining web 2.0' posts popping up (it's a never-ending cycle). I came to the realization at the end of last year that web 2.0 is an umbrella term, a catch-phrase for this era of the Web. It can - and does - mean anything that people say it means. e.g. take this snippet from an interesting MercuryNews interview with VC Peter Thiel:
"Q What's different from Web 1.0?
A Those companies that are successful are incredibly successful, and a lot of the other companies have no value at all. That's the thing that is so dizzying about Web 2.0."
OK, chalk that up as definition # 53,651 (to pick a big number out of the air).
<High Horse> But I have no problem with all these definitions anymore. What matters is that the current era of the Web is vibrant and making a difference to real people. In the end, that means more to me than trying to define what in essence is just a catch-phrase - although admittedly a very handy one with many uses. </High Horse>
Photo: Tantek
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Good point, Richard. Perhaps the most important thing about "Web 2.0" is that we now are seeing so much experimentation, so much innovation and improvement.
Posted by: Greg Linden | May 15, 2006 6:55 AM
Yeah, it's all great until all this new, creative development blows up and we have "Dot Com Crash 2.0 beta" and everything gets stifled for another 5 years.
What I see are a ton of sites doing the same things. I see incremental changes that are not groundbreaking being touted as the next big thing and being thrown money at astounding rates. Is it exciting? Maybe. Has it happened before? Yes and I can't believe everyone is getting so caught up in the "hype 2.0 beta".
Yes, push the envelope, but don't tell me this is the future of "Teh Interwebz." The web is still in its infancy and has been advancing steadily. I would just hate for the entire hype of web 2.0 rubbish to eclipse the underlying advances and slow down the pace of innovation. And I believe this will happen when companies start to really lose money on their ill-conceived copycat ideas.
The web 2.0 emperor has no clothes and he is fugly.
Posted by: Rich Paul | May 15, 2006 11:08 AM
It's too reductionist to say that "Web 1.0" wasn't full of experimentation and improvement, or that "Web 2.0" is nothing but incremental hype. There's a difference between the actual tools and the presentation they get from the folks in Marketing.
The Web 2.0 concept is a technical one. It seems to refer to otherwise stateless pages which can now update dynamically. This lets a page provide more content specific to the needs of each individual user, instead of forcing everyone to download a page packed with everything for everybody--and therefore for nobody.
And if the Marketing folks want to turn Web 2.0 into a differentiator for the masses, so they can make back some of their losses from the first Internet Bubble, so be it. Let the companies spend. I'd be happy to reconsider some of the job offers I turned down in 1998...
Posted by: Mike Zillion | May 16, 2006 6:22 PM