Dmitriy Kruglyak covers the recent spate of Web 2.0 coverage in the Wall Street Journal is a post called Health Social Networking & Web 2.0 Bubble. His take on Web 2.0 is cynical, but rings true in my ears. To me the real question is this: is there a Web 2.0 at all? If there is, its existence can be attributed to a curious characteristic of human culture: Old is the New New.
I am an avid fan of Web 2.0 technologies. AJAX, open APIs, mashups, and collaborative filtering mechanisms like tagging are much better building blocks for Web apps than earlier technologies like CGI and more proprietary technologies like Flash. I do wonder about the viability of Web 2.0 companies. Portals like Yahoo! buy up Web 2.0 companies; if you build a company that has no proprietary intellectual property and gives its products away for free, the only viable business model I can see is to sell out to a larger enterprise. In today's more realistic venture capital environment, it seems highly unlikely that VCs will give you big bucks and then wait around to see whether you are the next Amazon or the next Pets.com.
Dmitriy's view of Web 2.0 is very much like my own:
The so-called "Web 2.0" term was coined by Tim O'Reilly to sell his conference on the rebirth of the Internet. As a fellow conference organizer, I tip my hat to Tim. Marketing well done. However, the byproduct has been creation of the hype wave as bad as dotcoms'. Mark my words, Web 2.0 will ring like dotcom very soon.
I can sort of see why Dmitriy would tip his hat to Tim, though perhaps the kudos should go the other direction. D's conference, the Healthcare Blogging Summit, was grounded in reality, not marketing hype. Did the Internet really get reborn? From where I sat, looking at it with the grizzled and jaundiced eye of one who saw the birth of the PC and the birth of the Web, what I saw happening in the dot-com bubble-burst was the Internet shedding a bunch of pseudo-commercial tulip-craze barnacles, the removal of which revealed the underlying social phenomenon that evolved into what we now call social networking. I am as big a fan of social networking as I am of Web 2.0 technologies, but let's get real about rebirth. Aside from a new crop of pseudo-commercial barnacles, there's not a whole lot that's new about what people think of as Web 2.0.
Anyone who had access to elementary-school-age children anywhere in the developed world in the late '80's and early '90's could see that Generation Next saw little difference between telephones and computers - both were just communication tools to them. My daughters used AOL Messenger before there was a World Wide Web, and combined it with multi-way calling (they discovered the limit to the number of three-way calls you can tie together).
I look at MySpace and see a more elaborate version of the Web page my 11-year-old daughter posted on aol.com in 1996. The big difference is that MySpace inherited read-write capabilities, a techno-meme that originated with the first WikiWikiWeb, opened up by Ward Cunningham on March 20, 2005. The read-write techno-meme appeared in other forms: according to Wikipedia, blogging first began in 1994, for example. Tagging is another such social tech affordance, the read-write web applied to the concept of metadata. The dot-com bubble burst exposed things that were already well underway by 2001.
Technology is evolutionary by nature, as are social structures and functions. The dot-com bubble burst exposed things that were already well underway by 2001. Let's save the term "rebirth" for when things that are truly dead come alive again.
Maybe, though, rebirth does make sense, and I think Tim and Dmitriy both would agree with this. Web 2.0 is the rebirth of conversation, of the Salon, as defined in this quote from Wikipedia:
...a gathering of stimulating people of quality under the roof of an inspiring hostess or host, partly to amuse one another and partly to refine their taste and increase their knowledge through conversation and readings, often consciously following Horace's definition of the aims of poetry, "to please and educate" (aut delectare aut prodesse est). The salons, commonly associated with French literary and philosophical salons of the 17th century and 18th century, were carried on until quite recently in urban settings among like-minded people of a 'set': many 20th-century salons could be instanced [sic; presumably meaning that many 20th Century examples could be found].
I can think of no better description of the nature of a good business blog than this: "a gathering of stimulating people of quality under the [virtual] roof of an inspiring hostess or host, partly to amuse one another and partly to refine their taste and increase their knowledge through conversation and readings." Unlike the cocktail party, a salon is conversation with collective intent and direction, just as a business blog has intent and focus among its cardinal characteristics.
As a New Year's resolution, we couldn't do much better than to strive to "please and educate" in the blogs and blog posts we create.
Dale, thanks for adding the clarifying details to my argument. This debate needs to happen.
Happy New Year!
Posted by: Dmitriy Kruglyak | December 29, 2006 at 01:30 PM