Ever since Tim o'Reilly dreamt up the term back in 2003, people have been asking themselves, and often me, "yes, but what does it mean?" I've been embarrassed at my inability to answer that question more than once. Even the highly talented people at Tim's own shop have been unable to answer it without resorting to a five page article featuring some of the most convoluted graphs you'll ever hope to see. Wikipedia, a web 2.0 poster child in its own right, is unable to come to an internal agreement on a definition of the term as well, settling for a watered down compromise by describing it as "the second generation of web based communities and hosted services."
With all this confusion and disagreement on what Web 2.0 means and whether it means anything at all, where do I get off trying to define it? Who died and made me king? Well, truth be told, I'm no more qualified than you are. Then again, in this web 2.0 age; nobody is more qualified than anybody.
Does that mean I can, in short, concise sentences, define Web 2.0? Well, no. Truth is, Web 2.0 is increasingly being used as a marketing synonym for "new". But underneath the hype, there is a core of meaning hidden away. Let's go digging, shall we?
It turns out that Web 2.0 can mean several things. At its most literal level, the term refers to the transition from web sites to web applications. Unfortunately there's no solid white line separating web 1.0 from web 2.0 in this regard. Why, for example, would Hotmail, a web based email site that has been around since several weeks after the invention of the wheel (you should have seen the early banner ads), be Web 1.0 while gMail, a service that for all intents and purposes does exactly the same thing, is considered Web 2.0? Why is a syndicated column web 1.0 while a blog is web 2.0? Lame as it sounds, applications and services are often branded "Web 2.0" simply because they look and feel like Web 2.0. Are the buttons glossy? Web 2.0! Does my inbox refresh without reloading my page? Web 2.0!
I'm not being fair. There's much more to Web 2.0 than glossy buttons and Ajax. There's also the small matter of an infinite number of idiots who want their opinion to be heard. This phenomenon is known as collaboration. It was once commonly referred to as "Usenet", but that's a discussion nobody wants to get involved in. However, defining Web 2.0 by its collaborative nature actually makes sense. A syndicated column is Web 1.0 because a writer writes an article and readers comment on it. A blog is Web 2.0 because you write an article and nobody comments on it, but with you a million other people are also writing an article and talking about each others' articles, often disagreeing loudly with one another.
For a poignant example, let's look at the quintessential pre-web 2.0 geek news site; Slashdot. If you've ever been there, you know that Slashdot is more about the metadiscussion than the articles themselves. And Slashdot has had a collaborative rating system for this metadiscussion for more than ten years now. Still, most people wouldn't describe Slashdot as being Web 2.0. Why is that? A cynic would say that Slashdot isn't Web 2.0 simply because it was already around when the phrase was coined, and that cynic would be partially right. After all, hasn't Slashdot been offering users collaboration and the ability to self-moderate for a decade? What's missing?
Let's compare the new touchstone for geek news; Digg. Like Slashdot, Digg allows users to comment on the articles posted and allows them to self-moderate. There's not much difference there. On the other hand, Digg has shiny buttons. More importantly, where Slashdot articles are submitted by readers, they are approved or declined by editors. Readers suggest articles, and discuss the approved articles, but do not control which articles are posted. Digg, on the other hand, allows users to submit and approve and discuss articles without editorial intervention, often to the disgust of its owners. There's no doubt that Digg is Web 2.0, and very little doubt that Slashdot isn't. In spite of its lack of shiny buttons and its age, Slashdot could be web 2.0, if only it allowed its readers to approve articles. This leads us to a rather interesting conclusion, and perhaps part of our definition:
"A site or service is only Web 2.0 when all of its parts are Web 2.0". Great. Recursion. That'll simplify things. We're actually getting closer though. For the sake of convenience, let's summarize what we've learned so far:
- Web 2.0 is as looks like web 2.0. Shiny buttons and Ajax. Putting a V8 in a pickup truck doesn't make it a sports car, and putting a comment field on a syndicated column doesn't make it web 2.0.
- A site or product is only web 2.0 if all of its components are web 2.0. Much like the bacon bits in the salad, if one part of it isn't Kosher, none of it is, no matter how small that one part.
- Something is Web 2.0 when it allows or even requires its users to provide and rate content.
Have we come up with a definition yet?
"Web 2.0 describes sites or services that allow users to create, modify, rate, and comment on content as equals who collectively share full editorial control over the content and its presentation. With shiny buttons."
This raises an interesting question. What if a software giant launched a social collaboration site and nobody visited it? Would it still be Web 2.0? Is a collaborative infrastructure alone enough to term something so? While it's true that projects that strive to attain Web 2.0dom generally offer an infrastructure that is amenable to the collaboration it wishes to offer, for example through the use of formal rating systems, taxonomies, tags, and crosslinks, those things alone to not make the web 2.0, in much the same way twelve chairs, a large table, and an overhead projector does not make a board meeting. Perhaps a better term than Web 2.0 would be People 2.0.
Now. . .now we're on to something. Web 2.0 is the community of people who use the web. . .2.0. Dude, this is deep. You can't have web 2.0 without the communities, and you can't have the communities without the collaborative tools. I think we're ready to give that definition thing another shot:
"Web 2.0 is the the synergy between a community of people and the sites and services that allow them to interact with each other by offering the ability to create, modify, rate, and comment on content as inherent equals who collectively share full editorial control over the content and its presentation. With shiny buttons."
Of course, you're welcome to correct me. This is the Web 2.0, after all.
