That Old Chestnut

Yes, I am posting about the meaning of Web 2.0 again. I’d stop if other people would. Promise.

Anyway, Tim O’Reilly — someone I normally agree with — has posted a new ‘compact’ defin­i­tion of the term. Strangely, this is actually a longer defin­i­tion than the first one in some respects. That’s because it’s a pre­scriptive defin­i­tion rather than a descriptive one, which was the nice thing about his initial essay on the subject. The original essay looked at the elements of this new revolu­tion and attempted to discern its con­stituent features. There’s all this stuff going on: what does it have in common? If the old defin­i­tion was one made by a soci­olo­gist, the new one is made by a business advisor:

Web 2.0 is the business revolu­tion in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to under­stand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applic­a­tions that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. (This is what I’ve else­where called “har­nessing col­lective intelligence.”)

There are rules for success in this new defin­i­tion. There are more rules in the remainder of the post, para­phrased here to be a bit more spade-​​is-​​a-​​spade:

• Software isn’t a thing — it’s a way of engaging with users.
• Open your own data for others; and re-​​use the data provided by others.
• Applications might be client-​​based, server-​​based or a bit of both. The nature of your app will decide this.
• Openness and stand­ards win, but that doesn’t put an end to com­pet­itive advantage.
• The data you own and accrue through usage will be the key to future lock-​​in and com­pet­itive advantage.

These seem to be sensible sug­ges­tions. But are they rules? YouTube, e-​​bay and digg don’t have open APIs. Does that mean they are doomed? Also, isn’t there con­sid­er­able internal friction in this short­list between opening up your data and the idea that your data may well be your com­pet­itive advantage? Is online software such as Google Docs not Web 2.0 all of a sudden? People have been calling it Web 2.0 for the last two years. What should they call it instead?

I’m finding support in odd places. Nick Carr’s whole blog is pretty much spent on taunting Web 2.0 evan­gel­ists, but I am very much reminded of a post he made last week:

I think the best that can be said is that it suggests the aspects of Web 2.0 that most interest O’Reilly at this point. Which is fine, but not much help to anyone else.

The Web 2.0 wave encom­passes a lot of very dif­ferent applic­a­tions and approaches. The com­munity and the users have already made their own minds up about want they mean and what they want. It’s too late for a third party to start throwing rules around. In my opinion, if O’Reilly’s new defin­i­tion becomes canon­ical through some weird twist of fate then Google wins on everything and the rest of the web devel­op­ment world should give up now. It already has the biggest data­bases and the best records of almost all our beha­viours on the web. But that isn’t the case. It’s not all about ‘who has the biggest database’. And the inde­pend­ents will always have things to offer the world that the cor­por­ates would ever allow out of the dev-​​lab. Would Google or Yahoo! today ever have launched YouTube or del.icio.us or flickr or digg? I think not — they’d have said, “We already have the biggest and best video and book­marking and photo service. And we’ve invested a lot of cash into them. Anyway, who could possibly need anything else?”

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