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Web 2.0 Watch

Web Design Journal says Google has ended the Web 2.0 era by taking Blogger out of beta. Onward, they say, to Web 3.0! This is just wrong on many levels. First and foremost, Web 2.0 is a convenient label, not a real project with a clearly defined beginning and end. Though Google is a prominent practitioner of Web 2.0 voodoo, no single company can bring an end to the fuzzy conceptualization, and Web 3.0 doesn't necessarily follow (what happened to Web 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 etc.?)

Meanwhile Tim's attempted a new definition of Web 2.0. This light definition, and the paragraph that follows, makes a lot of sense, though it doesn't have to be called "Web 2.0"... I don't know that it's a change so much as a realization (which is pretty much what Tim is saying in the paragraph that follows the definition).

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.")

(Eric Schmidt has an even briefer formulation of this rule: "Don't fight the internet." That's actually a wonderful way to think about it. Think deeply about the way the internet works, and build systems and applications that use it more richly, freed from the constraints of PC-era thinking, and you're well on your way. Ironically, Tim Berners-Lee's original Web 1.0 is one of the most "Web 2.0" systems out there -- it completely harnesses the power of user contribution, collective intelligence, and network effects. It was Web 1.5, the dotcom bubble, in which people tried to make the web into something else, that fought the internet, and lost.)

In the nineties, when some of us were ranting about bottom up/community/online social networks/interactive and participatory, most of the business people who were ready to call the Internet an industry and monetize every bit were missing this point, and it worked against them in a big way. Many who got the point failed, too, because there wasn't enough air to breathe; they suffocated. "Web 2.0" is just a label, but it represents new sources of oxygen, room to breathe again, and everybody breathing in the same direction.

Take a look at Go2Web2.0 – "the complete web directory" – if you want to find innovative stuff that's been popping up in the wake of the 2.0 meme. I find myself wondering by what criteria a site is selected for this index. There's a go2web2 blog... recently launched and tech crunchy. (As you probably know, Tech Crunch has its own index – I don't know the criteria for selecting those, either. I suppose the criteria can be pretty loose. If Web 2.0 is an era defined by a way of thinking about the web, and not some specific set of technologies, you could include just about anything developed since the 2.0 meme appeared.

Ars Technica reports that comScore will "take Web 2.0 seriously" and get away from page views as the metric for determining a site's popularity (since many Web 2.0 sites are built with technologies like Ajax that don't generate page views for many uses of the site). Site metrics have always been a bit of a problem; creating a better way to determine popularity could be a very good thing.

... I know of more than one major acquisition deal involving hot Web 2.0 sites that have been stalled on this account. Site owners aren't about to leave money on the table because of what an analytics firm says, but companies in acquisition mode aren't always looking beyond the metrics. What's worse, the inaccurate numbers give a false impression of what's really attracting and retaining users online, and it's particularly unfair to the most cutting edge sites. Consider MySpace: do they really deserve the #1 spot simply because to do anything on MySpace, you have to load many, many pages? MySpace was built to generate page views. Other sites are built to minimize them.

To make matters worse, many of these traffic measurement services use data collection methods which are known to undervalue certain classes of users, including those dedicated to technology. comScore, for instance, tracks users who voluntarily participate in an e-commerce tracking system, and then it uses behavioral data from those opt-in users to extrapolate trends on a massive scale. As you might guess, this means that some sites are under represented. Ars Technica, for instance, attracts highly savvy readers who by and large do not opt in to such systems. The same is true for most technology sites online, and their scores suffer; comScore does not truly know our audience, only a small portion of it. Other metrics might rely on a toolbar or similar opt-in systems, which immediately raises the question of what qualifies as a "standard" Internet user. If that definition remains "guy who buys things online using Internet Explorer with this special toolbar installed," then you can see the problem.

In another world, the Wall Street Journal is questioning whether Web 2.0 is another "bubble." This is a debate about markets between two vcs, Todd Dagres and David Hornik. This is probably a good place to wrap...

Mr. Hornik: I think that you aren't giving Web 2.0 entrepreneurs enough credit. Sure, there are some "me too" sites out there. There always are. But the amount of rapid innovation in online services has been staggering -- from Skype to Digg to Six Apart to YouTube to Flickr to Facebook... The list goes on. They aren't microprocessor companies with years of patent-protected intellectual property. On the other hand, they are innovating around things that matter to consumers today. And I believe they are being appropriately valued, not just by potential acquirers but by the consumers themselves.

You say that billions are going to be lost. I think that overstates the potential problem. Certainly billions haven't been invested to date. It takes a whole lot of companies to get to billions when investing a few million dollars at a time. On the other hand, if a few billion dollars are lost in the face of exits like Skype and YouTube, and others that I see making hundreds of millions in the future, then the market is doing well and investors and entrepreneurs alike will emerge decidedly net positive. That doesn't sound like a bubble to me. That sounds like a vibrant market for innovation.

Mr. Dagres: Aha! We agree on what may be the most important point -- great entrepreneurs are the key to building valuable companies. If you invest in great people, you have a good chance of making money. In the current market there are gifted entrepreneurs that will benefit and thrive. These people will start disruptive companies that look for what will be hot rather than what is hot. They won't be lumped into the Web 2.0 category; they will define their own categories. This is what will separate the few winners from the many losers. So in closing, I am leery of Web 2.0 but I am always going to invest in great people pursuing big ideas.

Mr. Hornik concludes: I was recently asked by an entrepreneur what I thought would be the next great technology in the coming year. I told him I thought it would be the Internet. We have just started scratching the surface of the enabling power of the Internet. Whether it is called "Web 2.0" or "New Media" or "Enterprise 2.0," Internet services are going to drive the world's economies for the foreseeable future. To me that doesn't spell bubble, that spells opportunity. [Italics mine]

jon posted this at 11:12 AM
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