Web 2.0 - what is web 2.0?

Someone asked me the other day for my definition of Web 2.0, assuming that I must have published one somewhere, and I realized that I never have. What I have noticed, though, is that I can be having conversations with people about Web 2.0 in which I realize that we’re each talking about completely different aspects of the phenomenon. We might as well be talking about two entirely separate concepts. Except that it’s a replay of the old Indian folklore tale of the blind men and the elephant. They each grabbed a separate part of the animal and defined it in terms of what they were holding onto, without realizing that each part contributed to a greater whole. So I started to think about how I personally would define it.

Then, to cap it all, I was chatting to my wife at the weekend and happened to mention ‘Web 2.0′ just as we were pulling up at a stop light and, much to my surprise, she said to me, "What’s that?" That was a bit of an eye-opener, considering that my wife is as web-wise as any modern professional woman. And yet she genuinely had never come across this term that looms so large in my professional life. What’s more, I had to come up with a definition before the lights turned green. Here’s what I said:

"Web 2.0? It’s about using the Web collaboratively — sharing and mixing up information and resources — so moving on from the first generation of the Web, which was more about using websites just to publish content and sell things."

We turned off and went down the gradient towards the parking lot, so I decided to elaborate since I had another couple hundred yards to play with.

"It’s stuff like blogs and wikis." I hesitated. "I guess that’s a new word too: a wiki lets people team up to edit web pages and build out a web site. Wikipedia’s the best known example, you’ve come across that. Mashups are a big part of it, too."

I knew I was pushing my luck there with mashups, but I was about to pull up to the ticket machine. So now I had to define mashups.

"A mashup is where you mix up data or actions from different websites — like hooking up property listings with Google maps to show where they are, for example, although that was quite an early one; they’re starting to get a lot more sophisticated now."

And then we had to find a parking space and get the kids to their class so that was the end of the conversation, but I felt I’d just about covered it.

I was helped out by having read Dan Farber writing up Tim Berners-Lee’s recent dismissal of Web 2.0 as "a piece of jargon". He’s right, of course: the Web always was about collaboration, and if anything Web 2.0 is just the world catching up with what Berners-Lee always understood the Web to be from the outset.

No doubt he would be equally impatient with Tim O’Reilly’s compact definition of Web 2.0 as "the network as platform," as once again stating what should have been obvious right from the start.

I have another problem with Tim O’Reilly’s definition of Web 2.0 (even though I have to grant him first-mover advantage, as the original co-inventor of the term), which is that I felt his What is Web 2.0 article of a year ago puts too much emphasis on mixing up data and not enough on mixing up processes.

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Although there are many vendors touting their Web 2.0 products, Influxive is one of a very few companies that is able to provide end-to-end Web 2.0 solutions for business. Our R&D labs have produced the award winning Web 2.0 innovations that we use every day to gain greater productivity and competitive advantages and now your company can take advantage of the same benefits. The Influxive Web 2.0 vision combined with an extensive list of customer success stories will gain your confidence and trust that teaming with Influxive is the best choice for tapping into the benefits of Web 2.0 technologies.

Influxive can help your company use Web 2.0 technologies to:

• Enhance the customer experience and value by innovating the way you interact with your customers.
• Boost the quality and speed of the decisions employees make.
• Accelerate new business design(s) that is contextual and action-oriented.

As businesses increasingly embrace the potential of Web 2.0, Influxive is front and centre helping them to derive greater value from business-centric Web 2.0 technologies.

• Creating new markets
• Lowering competitive barriers
• Harnessing community created media
• Tapping into the wisdom of the crowds
• Enhancing communications, and
• Making information more impactful

Influxive Web 2.0 products advance innovation and growth

Web 2.0 technologies bring together interaction among individuals, information and data to drive new market opportunities and to foster communities. Influxive Web 2.0 toolsets, including collaboration and productivity tools use these technologies to help businesses deliver applications more flexibly and cost effectively.

• Richer UI (user interface) capabilities that enable "mashups"
• Real-time access to more relevant, trusted information
• Support for open-standards and Web 2.0 technologies

In our initial brainstorming, we formulated our sense of Web 2.0 by example:

Web 1.0		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

The list went on and on. But what was it that made us identify one application or approach as "Web 1.0" and another as "Web 2.0"? (The question is particularly urgent because the Web 2.0 meme has become so widespread that companies are now pasting it on as a marketing buzzword, with no real understanding of just what it means.

The question is particularly difficult because many of those buzzword-addicted startups are definitely not Web 2.0, while some of the applications we identified as Web 2.0, like Napster and BitTorrent, are not even properly web applications!) We began trying to tease out the principles that are demonstrated in one way or another by the success stories of web 1.0 and by the most interesting of the new applications.