Question Details: It seems there are alot of definitions about Web 2.0 throughout the industry. Even Tim O'Reilly in his piece What is Web 2.0 seems to have changed the definition of Web 2.0 as it have evolved with time.
In your opinion how do you define Web 2.0 and do you think this is a static definition or something that is more dynamic and really should be called Web 2x? What will trigger Web 2.1, 2.1.1, 2.5 etc?
I asked the above question to my LinkedIn network in mid-2007. At the time I was completing my MBA thesis and saw Web 2.0 as a combination of hype and perhaps a utopian view that was ahead of its time. On the surface Web 2.0 makes alot of sense, but the assumption is people are being accurate and if users are not accurate the Internet will self-police itself and they will be made irrelevant.
When I thought of Web 2.0, I was thinking in terms of how the term "Web 2.0" was branded. The software release naming of Web 2.0, made me believe there would be a Web 2.1, Web 2.5 and eventually some break through would lead to Web 3.0.
The concept of Web 2.0 has alot of flaws. Need an example, try adding a fact to Wikipedia. The volunteer experts, or whatever they deem themselves often will eliminate additions to pages. Even when a fact is added to Wikipedia with good intent to help the Internet community, it can be just as easily removed. The dynamic integrity of sites such as Wikipedia comes into question over territorial editors that have an agenda of maintaining near static pages. I have no issue with this structure, except that Wikipedia should label itself differently and have a volunteer editor approval process similar to DMOZ.
There has been real pushback on amateur created content. Tony Dokoupil recently outlined flaws of user-generated content in Revenge of the Experts. The argument is there is danger is unconfirmed, amateur content. Dokoupil also referenced Wikipedia concerns, "Last summer researchers in Palo Alto, Calif., uncovered secret elitism at Wikipedia when they found that 1 percent of the reference site's users make more than 50 percent of its edits." The momentum seems to now be swings towards expert-review content. This model makes sense for advertising revenue models as well.
In his farewell address, Regan said "Trust, but verify." He was not the first to utter this phrase and today this quote makes sense in applying it to the web. There is a real desire to have unfiltered content on the web. Unlike countries such as China, the U.S. has a relatively fully democratic web in regards to regulation and censorship. The Web 2.0 expansion enhanced Internet democracy, giving the average user a voice that could be heard. This was further magnified by search engine algorithms that give favorable SERPs (search engine rankings) to Web 2.0 content.
Today a unconfirmed blog can compete with an authentic piece of information and sometimes rank higher in search engines. This is accomplished through ranking. If you get enough people to link to your site for a given keyword you move up in the search engine rankings. The logic is that these links will help police the net. Let's use the 9/11 attacks as an example:
Screenshot Google Results "9/11 attacks"
Google search results for "9/11 attacks"
The above is a single search engine example. There are a variety of factors that would make a site rank for "9/11 attacks." The site can influence the ranking by use of its content, title tags and meta tags (descrption and keywords). The site can also provide influence through linking to its pages internally. If a site uses the keyword phrase "9/11 attacks" as a hyperlink (also known as anchor text), this helps identify to the search engines what the site is about. For narrow topics and long tail keyword phrases, on page content and optimization efforts can be all that is needed to rank at the top. As the keywords get smaller, other factors are required to acquire a top ranking.
The Google example means there were alot of outside sites that used the word "9/11 attacks" or something similiar as anchor text. Consider each link as a vote to the search engines about what another site is about. The result is a popularity contest.
Let's review the top then results again an compare how many links Google gives credit to:
| Rank | Google Index | Inbound Links | URL |
| 1 | 3,690,000 | 1,250 | Wikipedia.org |
| 2 | 50 | 1,510 | september11news.com |
| 3 | 2,470 | 2,470 | noosphere.princeton.edu/terror.html |
| 4 | 11,600,000 | 6 | geocities.com/vonchloride/ |
| 5 | 359 | 795 | 9-11commission.gov/ |
| 6 | 104 | 182 | killtown.911review.org |
| 7 | 4,090 | 19 | urbanlegends.about.com/cs/historical/a/nostradamus.htm |
| 8 | 549,000 | 55 | cbsnews.com/stories/2003/12/17/eveningnews/main589137.shtml |
| 9 | 466,000 | 0 | dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/showbiz/showbiznews.html?in_article_id=523729&in_page_id=1773 |
| 10 | 388,000 | 78 | cnn.com/2001/US/09/11/chronology.attack/ |
Without diving into deep detail, some surface observations can be made. The Princeton page has the most inbound links, but what is the concentration of the keyword "9/11" and "attacks" in the anchor text? The next highest in Google inbound links is september11news.com, followed by Wikipedia.
Logic would lead you to suspect a government organization such as the 9-11 Commission would be the top ranked authoritive figure, if not a news media source. In this example a Web 2.0 site is that has authority on the topic. This is positive because users have the ability to voice information, but this is also negative because anyone can submit unverified information and that information remains as fact unless someone removes it.
The lack of traditional authority sites for this keyword search is illustrative of how search engines work. Search engines are not intelligent in the way humans are. Search engines have the ability to draw connections between subjects, however it needs this information to perform analysis. The flaw is that it does not validate information for fact. If a high ranking site such as Wikipedia, or even a top ranked blog states an inaucurrate statement as truth, then to the search engine, it could be indexed as the truth because the site has an authority status.
To validate this on your own, perform a search for "moon landing." This is another example where Wikipedia ranks in the first position. The sites following consist of NASA sites and a YouTube video. After that the conspiracy sites start to appear. Due to enough people believing in a conspiracy these sites have credibility from external link building. The expectation is lower-tiered sites or news stories should be located underneath NASA information about this topic. The absence of news stories and the status of conspiracies and hoaxes illustrates a flaw in the intelligence of search engines. Having more intelligent search and drawing better connections between truth is a discussion point of what will define Web 3.0.
Answers to "How Do you Define Web 2.0"
Responses are from April of 2007
Andy Theimer - Most Web 2.0 debates I've seen revolve around two concepts: 1. Community and 2. Interactivity. Interesting though is that the 'community' has decided they would like the term to refer to interactivity rather than the O'Reilly definition. If there are to be future revisions of Web X.0, my guess is that the community will adapt the definition to what they feel is the most exciting new aspect of the web.
Robert Fornal - I think that Web 2.0 is just getting into it's own and that the definition is too dynamic to pin down ... it is more of a driving force than a definition. It pushes the boundaries and is the catalyst for this change.
Jason Barile - My simplistic view of "Web 2.0" can be summed up with 2 concepts: 1) beta - it's always in flux, iterating quickly and reacting to the needs/demands of the community, and 2) "user generated content". This can be through actual user submitted content (like videos posted to YouTube) or even as simple comments on a blog or posts on a forum. Web 2.0 is about helping people connect to one another to share ideas and information and evolving as quickly as necessary to keep the flow going.
Thomas Kutschi - I think Web 2.0 is neither technology (ajax & stuff) nor content concepts (community, user generated content).
It's the change in thinking towards "yes, we can do it" similar to the thinking before the first .com-bubble. More people dare to start a business, more people try out services.
Nick Sullivan -
Web 1.0 was defined by information accessiblity.
Web 2.0 is defined by interactivity, social networking, and user generated content. Myspace.com, flickr.com, blogs, wikipedia.com are notable examples.
Web 3.0, aka the "Semantic Web" is still being defined, but it is my belief that we will be defined by the semantic relationships of the Internet, the surfer-defined web. Here are some examples.
Instead of a static site navigation tree, users will be able to navigate sites with trees created dynamically based on how other users enter the site and click around. The navigation becomes self updating and based on real world usage.
News sites will be self updating based on people's interest and click patterns. You will be able to immediately see which stories were popular, ranked high, written well, seeing a lot of traffic, or all of the above, because their links were highlighted based on real time traffic patterns and approval ratings.
In search results, if everyone is clicking on the 5th result for a particular term, that term will become the 1st result for that term. In real time. Search results will include the top 3 referring pages in the results, so you can see how people are arriving at the page.
News sites will be able to predict the news of tomorrow based on search patterns. Yahoo is already able to predict American Idol winners based on the names that people search on.
There is so much data available about the internet based on how real people are using it. Early attempts to capture this by sites like Digg are admirable, but there is so much more that we can do.
Web 3.0 will be defined by how intelligently we can tap into this data to make it better - creating relationships that know one could have predicted.
Web 4.0. No one knows. Seth Godin took a pretty good stab at it (see attached link).
Pat Nakajima - Personally, I think that "Web 2.0" was just the product of "the perfect storm" of fads. We saw graphic design cliches begin to rot at precisely the same time people realized that AJAX-EVERYTHING probably wasn't/isn't' the best way to design your application. The evolution of web applications needs no numbering. We just found ourselves at a particularly strange time, especially for this relatively young medium.
Mark Fisher -
Web 2.0 is the web as a computing platform like Windows or Java. A good example of this is Google Apps. The key ingredient to making this work is AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML), though others are coming along, like W3C's Xforms and Adobe's Apollo. Web 2.0 allows the user to do real, meaningful work, just like the stuff we now do on Windows or UNIX boxes, but without the platform dependence. The browser is the user platform and the server platform is transparent.
All the other stuff extolled for Web 2.0 is implied from this, but isn't a requirement. As Web 2.0 is by its nature client-server, every client-server app on the web tends to get pulled under the Web 2.0 heading. Flickr is often touted as a Web 2.0 app, but it isn't; the data uploaded there cannot be manipulated, just showed around and commented on. Wikipedia is likewise branded, but again, it isn't; such a system could have been built by a dedicated dial-up bulletin board operator decades ago.
Cooperative sites have existed since WAIS, publicly accessible databases since gopher, and social networking since finger. Web 2.0 is none of these things, though they are often seen as a result of it. What is truly implied by Web 2.0 is a responsive client server interface that is defined by the connection, not the boxes on either end.
See the O'Reilly article for a counterpoint to this.
Links:
Chris Warrender
-
My personal opinion is that web 2.0 should never have been called web 2.0 - I personally hate 'versioning' titles when it's not the norm - software, by all means - but something as fluid and evolutionary as the web - come on!
I know Tim is the 'namer' here and no disrespect but since he called it web 2.0 it seems that everyone is using it and using it badly, incorrectly, to mean different things, to mean whatever they think it is....
Mostly is a good way to get someone to understand reasonable what their site does - if they said web site - it's like, 'so what' - if they say I gotta web 2.0 thing happening - it's like, 'really, cool, what's it all about?'
i love to hear people define web 3.0 and web 4.0 and even web 5.0 - but I'll stay well away from them and the future versioning of it.
What's next? Life 2.0?
This is why Jake 2.0 was cancelled! LOL
:-)
Patrick Herron - Chris I wrote about Web 4.0, just for you. Honestly. (http://tinyurl.com/27fd7o) Labels such as "web 2.0" obviously indulge in the cheese factor but they also provide us with organizing concepts, however ambiguous such concepts may be. In fact I'd argue that the ambiguity surrounding "web 2.0" (e.g., for every person there seems to be a different definition for the term) is a strength.
The web 2.0 conference showed that there are a lot of followers in the web 2.0 culture but few leaders. The degree of ambiguity could be dueto the simple lack of grand visions architected under the auspices of the term.
Web 2.0 marks the beginning of a web shift away from horizontally-oriented technologies and towards vertically-oriented solutions. Tools are getting better and better matched to specific contexts. We're also starting to see the beginning of a maturation process with the use of user behavior data, social network data, semantics, ontologies.
I'm not sure versioning web 2.0 at 2.1, 2.2, etc., makes much sense. Web 2.0 is a term for describing the view from 10,000 feet, however interesting or uninformative the term may be.
Links: http://tinyurl.com/27fd7o
Ivan Gammel - I think that Web 2.0 is more a marketing term than matter of technology. The prime feature of web 2.0 applications is advanced interactivity plus advanced technology (well, not superior yet... Let's wait for XHTML 2.0, desktop gadgets and other sweet things boom). It is based on 10-year old technologies (poor hypertext language - HTML; XMLHttpRequest invented by Microsoft; sessionless HTTP protocol;), so it is not a software technology breakthrough. In my opinion, it is a change in user minds driven by spread of broadband connections: more people, bigger markets, more diversity - and the Web looks different than 10 years before. An here is the actual meaning of "2.0" message: "Web(We) has(have) changed. No more failing dotcoms, more professionalism, more success, more income." Not sure if this is really true, however :)
Catherine Soubeyrand -
In one study, seven topics were gathered and looked at under the label Web 2.0 :
- RSS
- blogs
- wikis (with wikipedia as a reference, for collaborative editing)
- peer to peer
- collective intelligence
- social networking
- forget the last one.
I will add the URL, tomorrow.
Clarification: Last one is Mash-up.
Below a link to a study, "How businesses are using Web 2.0:" A McKinsey Global Survey, it is free but registration is required.
Catherine
Ed Lass - I have a simple definition:
Web 2.0 is the development of business models around web technologies and trends that have emerged since the burst of the dot-com bubble.
There's a LOT of interesting stuff in those trends and technology, so I don't mean to minimize the impact of user-generated content or the wisdom of crowds or Ajax or whatever else, but the one thing that puts it all under the same umbrella is monetization.
Shane Curcuru - Philosopical answer: Web 2.0 is a marketing and hype word for what we'll be talking about until the next real revolution in networked computing happens. At that point, suddenly user agents (i.e. PCs, operating systems, and browers) will have some new way of sharing information that everyone uses, and it may well be called something different.
Technically, Web 2.0 tends to mean web-based applications that are much more shareable, interactive, and user-driven than in the past. Yahoo Pipes is an excellent example (not that there aren't a million other good examples!).
Everyone has a website with content (blogs, newspapers, banks, whatever). Yahoo Pipes now allows a user - without technical expertise, and without paying for a server or other resource of their own - to create their own application, which is based on multiple other applications out there. That's the interactivity, and the abiilty for users to create mashups and the like, which separates 2.0 from 1.0 Web era.
The "Semantic Web" is vaugely related to Web 2.0, but only geeks really care about it right now; the average human doesn't know or care what it means, which is just fine. We're still waiting for the day when computers actually just do what people want, rather than having to learn how to make a computer do what people want.
Eric Smith - Not technical razzle-dazzle but the sheer aesthetic superiority of its elegant parabolic design make the GFX-100 a Marketing Breakthough!
Links: http://www.milk.com/wall-o-shame/dish.html
Babu Manoharan - you want a one line answer ?
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