The Death Of "Web 2.0"
by Volker Weber
I'm not going to discuss the economic meltdown and its devastating effect on technology companies and internet startups in this post, but rather something that crossed my mind earlier this morning: "Web 2.0" seems to become more and more a void (and an avoided) term.
Comments
I'm not sorry to see it go. As with many other terms, it got over used and over-hyped, until it became more or less content free. And when that happens, what's the point of perpetuating it?
Bob,
It never had much content. As invented by the O'Reilly group (Tim credits an employee), it merely referred to a second (more muted, echo?) coming of the Internet boom. As used by others, it seemed to refer to social computing (e.g., myspace, facebook, twitter, etc.), but I'm not sure that was very useful, either.
Nick
I'm not interested in what "it" is called, but there is clearly a change/evolution in web, both on the technology side and the cultural aspects. Having a way to talk about that is helpful. The web today is certainly more about participation (blogs, wikis, microblogs, ratings, reviews, idea voting, photo/video/music/slides/file sharing, etc, etc, etc) than it was just a few years ago.
Is it 2.0? Nah. I'd say the first web shared info on static pages. (customer: do you have a www?) The second became interactive with things like e-commerce (do you have a shopping cart?), so at a minimum we should be on 3.0 already. (do you have a blog?)
