The Shape of Days

On Thursday, Steve Rubel wrote about a new Web-based e-mail program from Apple. He described it as using “Web 2.0 technologies.”

Yesterday Paul Stamatiou let him have it, saying “The term ‘Web 2.0 technology’ does not exist.” Then he spouted some technical mumbo-jumbo about, like, programming languages and stuff.

Steve then turned around and conspicuously edited his original post to remove the term “Web 2.0,” giving credit to Stamatiou for the assist. I really can’t tell if he’s being facetious, but knowing Steve, I’d say probably not. If it were me, it totally would have been. Just FYI.

Now, seriously. I mean no disrespect. But Stamatiou’s is about the dumbest critique of a blog post I can think of in recent memory. He would have been better off criticizing Steve’s spelling or grammar, because at least then he would have been arguing about something objective. Simply declaring that the phrase “Web 2.0 technology” doesn’t exist — particularly when folks like the PR flacks at IBM disagree — is ridiculous.

Now, I will be the first one to agree that “Web 2.0” is kind of a silly expression. I’m not sure we ever got Web 1.0 right, but leave that aside for a minute. The term, which was coined by Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle of O’Reilly Media back in 2004, had a very specific if totally nebulous meaning at the time. O’Reilly and Battelle enumerated a laundry list of soft, fuzzy ideas that they said comprised the next big thing in the online world, “Web 2.0.”

Basically they just smooshed together a few new ideas — like content and service syndication, a fundamental change in the classic software development cycle and the aggregation of consumer-generated content — and threw a label on them.

That was in 2004, though. That was two years ago, which in Internet time is forever. Today, the expression “Web 2.0” has taken on a life of its own, a meaning distinct from the one O’Reilly and Battelle tried to assign to it. And a meaning with more than a trace of tongue thrust firmly into cheek, I might add.

Today, “Web 2.0” is a synonym for “things we do on the Web today that we didn’t when do when the Web was new.” It can mean anything from primarily user-driven sites like Digg or YouTube (as opposed to editor-mediated sites like CNN or Slashdot, or author-driven sites like this one) to those neat little animation effects you see on certain Web pages. “Web 2.0” is an umbrella term now.

Ironically, the less specific “Web 2.0” got, the more meaningful it became. Because originally it was so specific and yet so vague that the term was practically useless. Lots of people argued about what was and what was not “Web 2.0.” And that’s what brings us here today.

It’s long past time for Web people to start taking themselves a hell of a lot less seriously. Stop trying to be scientifically rigorous with your marketing buzzwords. “Web 2.0” doesn’t mean anything except what people believe it means. And today it means “something that’s cool and that’s, if not precisely new, at least sufficiently new that the novelty hasn’t worn off yet.”

Heh. It seems that “Web 2.0,” a term coined to describe a then-new trend of subversive technologies and methods that had the effect of disintermediating the Web, has itself been disintermeditated. Fly, little “Web 2.0.” You’re free now.

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