Blogature

Jon and I were answering some interview questions for an email interview we’re doing with the folks over at VoodooVentures a few days ago. One of their questions was about how we defined Web 2.0 and whether we thought we were a Web 2.0 application. The idea of Web 2.0 has bugged us for a long time, but we could never really put our finger on why. Working on the answer for their interview focused our thinking, and I thought I would share what we talked about. You’ll see an abbreviated version of this in our VoodooVentures interview, but the long version is below.

As far as we’re concerned, Web 2.0 defines an era. When people try to put together functional descriptions of what a Web 2.0 application is, the end result is that they don’t exclude a whole lot of applications developed in the past 3 years. Web 2.0 encompasses too many ideas ranging from usability to social software to business models to specific technologies to really be meaningful. It turns out that most modern web applications include some of these ideas.

This is not to say that the term Web 2.0 is useless. History is frequently divided into temporal segments. In culture and fashion, we commonly talk about 90’s bands, 80’s hairstyles, or Victorian literature. Web 2.0 is just another way of separating the history of web applications. That’s great - we need those terms to understand the field in which we work.

The other bit of evidence that points towards Web 2.0 being an era term not a genre term is the inevitability of its death. Last week, the NY Times reported on the future of Web 3.0 (which we disagree with, but that’s beside the point) and various articles use the term Web 1.0 disparagingly to imply “old”. It would be crazy to claim that genres have this inevitable march of progress in the way people talk about Web 3.0 coming after Web 2.0. You couldn’t (seriously) claim that rock deterministically lead to grunge which deterministically lead to rap-rock. You can trace inspirations, sure, but that’s not linear “this is better than what came before” progress. Even the name “Web 2.0″ implies monotonic positive progress by using software versioning as its basic metaphor, which is also an era term.

Somewhat orthogonal to era, we also describe ideas/art/scholarship/music by genre; for instance classical as a genre spans eras. It represents a somewhat different style now (eg Philip Glass) than it did two hundred years ago (eg Beethoven) but still shares some important thematic elements. So what’s always annoyed us is that Web 2.0 is often used as a genre term when it’s really an era term. It would be silly to ask Smashing Pumpkins if they’re a 90’s band in just the same way it’s silly to ask if Flickr is a Web 2.0 application. Of course they’re both members (and in some ways quintessential members) of their respective eras.

So yes, we are a Web 2.0 application. But not in the way we think most people understand Web 2.0.