Fictive Kin ·5 min read
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Proposed: There’s no such thing as Web 2.0. Well, that’s not actually true. Let me back up. Here’s what I think happened. In the beginning, Web 2.0 was a conference. As conferences go, a good one—with a great name.
The first Web 2.0 conference was held in the fall of 2004, and coincided with a large number of people in the tech industry (myself included) peeking our heads out from the fallout from the nuclear winter of 2001-2003 and realizing that the Web was not only not dead, it was thriving. From there, it was easy to conclude that “Web 2.0” was a thing, a noun, something to which you could refer to explain a new generation of Web services and Web companies. Many people have since pointed out that there is no clear definition of Web 2.0. Tim O’Reilly, whose organization created the conference (and the term), attempted to define Web 2.0 as follows:
”Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an “architecture of participation,” and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.” This is, believe it or not, the short definition. The long one was much, much longer.