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What the Heck is Web 2.0?

The technology trade press has been raving about “Web 2.0” as the next big thing. But what is it really?

John Bradley "JJ" Jackson

26 Mar 2007 • 1 min read

The technology trade press has been raving about “Web 2.0” as the next big thing. But what is it really?

It turns out that Web 2.0 is a term coined by O'Reilly Media CEO Tim O'Reilly, a computer book publisher. About 18 months ago, O'Reilly was at a conference and was trying to describe the differences between the web technologies of five years ago versus what is now available. He casually described the new world of blogs, wikis, and open source as the next wave and christened it Web 2.0. That is all it took.

Since his "top of mind introduction" of the term Web 2.0, it has had a viral marketing adoption by all the technology geeks and media pundits. The term is now posted everywhere including on websites, as product names, and as a frequent topic at conferences. It seems that a light switch was turned on and Web 2.0 has now become gospel: a must have feature or tag line for all technology offerings, advertisements, and conversations.

I visited his website (http://www.oreillynet.com) and found the following chart that hopes describe what he meant:

Old Term..............................................New Term
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..................................................Tagging
Stickiness....................................................Syndication

OK, I get it. But, all this hoopla is just a clever term for the continued evolution of internet technologies. No more and no less.

And guess what? I just read an article about Web 3.0! Same BS, different name.