I was recently asked what web 2.0 stood for and I found myself groping for a credible explanation. Snippets of information, I had read all along flashed through my mind, but still, I found myself at complete loss of words. “Does web 2.0 mean anything at all”, a thought coupled with the request of my colleagues to find information relating to web 2.0, triggered this inquest. The term has been tossed generously across the world wide web and I decided to start looking for an answer using the same medium.
Wikipedia was my preferred choice and according to them “ Web 2.0 is a term describing the trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users. These concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies”. In my opinion ( and as described by wiki), web 2.0 is more of a trend than technology, and cannot be used to demarcate web 2.0 from web 1.0. I was thinking about it, more on lines of an ongoing evolution of the world wide web rather than a distinct point in time when a technological transition happened. As always, all things evolve over a period of time and its natural and bound to happen. Describing it as a particular phenomena is unjust. I wanted to have a second opinion, as I always do ( to be sure) and found resonance of my thoughts in the words of Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the Internet. According to him “Web 2.0 is a piece of jargon. Nobody really knows what it means”. He went on to further say that “if web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the web was supposed to be all along”. The part relating to people is of particular interest to me, as it signals a shift in the perception on world wide web as a medium. Web 2.0 could be treated more as the next gen world wide web that draws its effectiveness from the ability of users to collaborate and share information.
I wanted to know more about the genesis of the term, to see if the people who invented the term had a different school of thought. According to Tim O' Reilly and Dale Dougherty, accredited for coining the term during a conference brainstorming session in 2004, “Web 2.0 does not have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core. You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core”. In principle, the world wide web is still the same but has added new dimensions to itself, in a sense evolved. As technology advanced, so did the web and the process is never ending. So was their a need to give this evolution a name or was it just a marketing gimmick? Maybe, it wasn't a deliberate attempt to name this trend but just an attempt to show that the web mattered again, after the dot-com bubble burst. Four years since, and the industry still lacks consensus on what web 2.0 is and what it constitutes off.
In essence, web 2.0 is more of a platform based on the principle that service automatically gets better, the more people use it. This architecture of participation uses web as an intelligent broker connecting the edges (end user). The philosophy being that the users don't just passively imbibe information from the web but actively contribute and supplement information, that is already available. Sites like Youtube, Wikipedia, Facebook, LinkedIn etc derive its effectiveness from this inter human connectivity. Bart Decrem, founder of Flock, calls this the “participatory Web”. This has empowered users in ways, we could have only imagined a decade ago. The web is more democratic than ever before, with big players ready to relinquish the user end control. Those who fail to see the human side of this technological revolution, are or destined to be lost in oblivion. The jury is still out on whether web 2.0 is a new concept or was it always present. All we know for sure is that it is happening now and we can see it happen. No one can predict when it would stop or when it started, and would take its own course.
I am quite amazed that I started my research by using Wikipedia, which now turns out to be a facet of web 2.0. Also, I have not forgotten that I still need to define what web 2.0 stands for, so that next time someone asks me this question, I can save myself from looking like an idiot, by having a ready made answer. Web 2.0 can be described as “world wide web – of the people, for the people, by the people”. It might not be a scientifically correct definitions, but I think this is web 2.0 in a nutshell.