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Web 2.0 (really?)
When I first started hearing about Web 2.0 back in 2004, I think I like other seasoned high tech professionals, I thought it was just a gimmick to get people to show up at a tradeshow. Recently I read an article by Paul Graham that confirmed that suspicion. In fact the term Web 2.0 came about because of a brain storming session between Tim O’Reilly (Tim O'Reilly is founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media) and Medialive International (producer of tech tradeshows). So looking in my rear view mirror, it was a couple of marketing wiz guys running amuck with an intriguing slogan. Their gem managed to draw VC’s and CEO’s to the early Web 2.0 tradeshow because they were the only ones who could afford the $2800 cost of admission. I don’t think anybody really believed that Web 2.0 was some spanking new technology that was going to cause another boom in the valley; it was viewed more as a place holder for things to come. It seems I did not hear anything about Web 2.0 for a couple of years and then only occasionally in passing and figured it would die a slow death, but they started pushing the web as a platform and then the term web democracy was added. Being a hardware guy, I was thinking…..who-cares, but was interested to see what the next slogan was going to be so I could make fun of it (business was slow….what are you going to do). Web 2.0 did not die, it just kind oozed along like a gulf oil spill…. Paul Graham pointed out an oddity in Ryan Singel's article that the conference in Wired News spoke of "throngs of geeks" attending a Web 2.0 conference. When a friend of his asked Ryan about this, it was news to him. He said he'd originally written something like "throngs of VCs and biz dev guys" but had later shortened it just to "throngs," and that this must have in turn been expanded by the editors into "throngs of geeks." After all, a Web 2.0 conference would presumably be full of geeks, right? In reality throngs of geeks meant 7 geeks went to the second Web 2.0 conference. The article should have read “a thong of geeks”, but that might have been a little too risqué. The idea that there could be a Web 2.0 did manage to get more people to attend the next Web 2.0 conference on the off-chance that there might be something to the name. Who could take a chance not to be in on the next big deal, everyone was looking for an edge as business was not exactly booming in the tech industry, with the exception of mobile technology. Paul Graham goes on to say “I wouldn't quite call it "Bubble 2.0" just because VCs are eager to invest again. The Internet is a genuinely big deal. The bust was as much an overreaction as the boom. It's to be expected that once we started to pull out of the bust, there would be a lot of growth in this area, just as there was in the industries that spiked the sharpest before the Depression. The reason this won't turn into a second Bubble is that the IPO market is gone. Venture investors are driven by exit strategies. The reason they were funding all those laughable startups during the late 90s was that they hoped to sell them to gullible retail investors; they hoped to be laughing all the way to the bank. Now that route is closed. Now the default exit strategy is to get bought, and acquirers are less prone to irrational exuberance than IPO investors. The closest you'll get to Bubble valuations is Rupert Murdoch paying $580 million for Myspace. That's only off by a factor of 10 or so”. Wikimedia defines the term Web 2.0 as web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design,[1] and collaboration on the World Wide Web. A Web 2.0 site allows users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators (prosumers) of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to websites where users (consumers) are limited to the passive viewing of content that was created for them. Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking sites, blogs, wikis, video sharing sites, hosted services, web applications, mashups and folksonomies. I still think Web 2.0 is just a more advanced Web 1.0, but it is all just semantics really. It would be nice if it was something easier to define and more distinctive. Web 2.0 in my mind will have to use nano technology and do something really cool like wash your car or create your perfect date….am I asking for too much……? Oh and I am still waiting for those flying cars to become cheap and available. ------------------ This story is brought to you buy Asset Conversion Services, the people who know how to upgrade Web 2.0 servers. 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