What actually does Web 2.0 mean?

I think very few people actually know. And that includes marketers and advertisers and a lot of other people in the digital industry. Many people call it meaningless marketing, others see it as one of the most important sections of the web textbook.

Well the term covers a lot of ground, but essentially it refers to the web, post the dotcom crash around 2000, 2001. When venture capitalists were throwing millions into startups without asking for anything resembling a business plan, when that 15 year old kid down the road was charging £10 000 to put up a website about grannies cats and it came with the ubiquitous rotating @ sign. Vomit. So now the web pre 2000 is referred to as web 1.0. Got that? Great. The web has grown up a lot since those heady days, the mistakes have (largely) been acknowledged and while it did set the digital industry back somewhat, ok a lot, the web is flourishing once more, but now with more direction and maturity.

The term web 2.0 is generally credited to Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty following the O’Reilly Media conference in 2004. As the story goes, they were brainstorming ideas for a main theme for the conference and realised that there had been a major shift in the way designers, developers and end users were approaching websites and the web in general. Websites that had survived the dotcom bubble crash as well as the new technologies that were developing were fast turning the web into a more streamlined, more user friendly big brother, resource.

As Tim O’Reilly writes, they formulated a list of what they thought were some of the main examples of web 1.0 vs web 2.0:

DoubleClick <—> Google AdSense
Ofoto <—> Flickr
Akamai <—> BitTorrent
mp3.com <—> Napster
Britannica Online <—> Wikipedia
personal websites <—> blogging
evite <—> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation <—> search engine optimization
page views <—> cost per click
screen scraping <—> web services
publishing <—> participation
content management systems <—> wikis
directories (taxonomy) <—> tagging (“folksonomy”)
stickiness <—> syndication

Is it becoming clearer now? Still with me? Brilliant. So basically there wasn’t any deliberate plan to revise the web and update it to version 2.0, O’Reilly just wanted to make the point that after the no rules Wild West Web of 2000 and 2001, the web was starting to matter again. Web 2.0 has taken on many meanings and thus means different things to different people, but you could also argue that we’ve moved onto web 3.0 and even web 4.0.

Some people are starting to argue that we’re entering another bubble and hence may be susceptible to another crash. There’s an excellent essay on paulgraham.com which argues that will not be the case. Venture capitalists are driven by exit strategies and their exit strategy in early 2000 was to sell to gullible investors. There obviously aren’t many gullible investors left, the IPO market is gone. Now the only way to make a profit is to get bought and the people fronting the cash want to be certain that what they’re buying is profitable or is likely to be profitable in the future.

So web 2.0 encompasses many things digital, design has also moved on, a loose list of of web do’s and don’ts regarding design is being implemented, eg, getting rid of ‘under construction’ pages and useless animating elements, rather giving emphasis to style and simplicity and finally realising that content really is king and designing a page around it’s content, rather than all style and no substance. Branding is actually starting to take a back seat to the content, i.e it’s not all about the bigger logo (watch that, it’s a classic), and footers of websites are starting to become very functional areas. People have learnt to scroll. Most people when talking of Web 2.0 and design talk about large text, reflections, cute icons, rounded corners,  strong colours, gradients (used properly) and easily defined sections and areas on a page. Some of these will drop away as other trends replace them and the ones that work will stay.

So there you go and as one of the co-founders of this much used, possibly over used term, I’ll leave the last word to the big guy, Tim O’Reilly,

“The network is opening up some amazing possibilities for us to reinvent content, reinvent collaboration.”

Long live the interweb. Actually I got the last word.