What is web 2.0 anyway?

It’s one of the latest web buzzwords, which you’ll almost certainly have come across in articles and blog posts if you have even a passing interest in all things internet. But what does it actually mean, and is it even a meaningful concept?

Well, as far as I can figure it out (and feel free to correct me if I'm missing something) it starts from the point of view of the internet as a platform, and focuses on the right way of doing things on that platform: in short, understanding the web as a medium and fully embracing its strengths.

It’s about involvement and participation: a social structure. It’s about social networking and folksonomies, tagging, social indexing, blogs and wikis; about user contributed content. It’s about open source development – collaborative building of software and applications. And it’s about better web applications – applications online which are every bit as good as those on your desktop, with powerful, user friendly, AJAX driven user interfaces. The face it wears has rounded corners, drop shadows and reflections, but don’t let that put you off: it’s all about the ethos.

But does it really exist? Or is it just another meaningless marketing buzzword, based around the concepts which always underpinned the web in the first place? Well, yes and no. To me, it feels like a way of describing the web community picking itself up and fully shaking off the whole dot.com boom & bust. The dot.com thing attracted a bunch of greedy people who thought they were going to use the internet to make their millions, and the internet bit back. Yes, some made their millions, but many, many more didn’t: they went away with their tails between their legs, and now the internet’s a nicer place. We share things. We play nicely. We’re democratic. We try to only put good things on the web, and then we help each other find them. We don’t dictate things to our users and we don’t expect others to dictate things to us.

That’s how I choose to see it, anyway. Yes, it is kind of a nebulous concept, and yes, it is referring back to the old ethos of the web from the start – but if it helps us to focus on what’s good about what we’re all doing out there on the world wide web, and if it helps us to stick to those great ideals, then I'm all for it.

For a great web 2.0 article, see: http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html June 23rd, 2008 / 4 Comments / Tags: web 2, web 2.0 / Trackback