Wacky Web 2.0

I’ll admit, I’m one of the people who generally thinks the term “Web 2.0” is fairly silly. When you boil it all down, what exactly is “Web 2.0”, when did the web upgrade exactly, and is there another version on the way? I mean, I’m already thinking that I invested well into six figures into the first one when the whole tech bubble was all said and done, so I’m a little hesitant about buying the expansion pack if we’re getting another revision in a few months.

At this point, you’re likely confused (Web 2.0 what?), amused (because you also find it silly), or outraged (because you’re the guy making all the money off of Web 2.0 seminars and books). To help get everyone up to speed I’ll borrow from my good friend at Wikipedia again for a quick and dirty definition of what Web 2.0 is all about:
The term Web 2.0 refers to a second generation of services available on the World Wide Web that lets people collaborate and share information online. In contrast to the first generation, Web 2.0 gives users an experience closer to desktop applications than the traditional static Web pages. Web 2.0 applications often use a combination of techniques devised in the late 1990s, including public web service APIs (dating from 1998), Ajax (1998), and web syndication (1997). They often allow for mass publishing (web-based social software). The concept may include blogs and wikis.

The term was popularized by O’Reilly Media and MediaLive International as the name for a series of web development conferences that started in October 2004. CMP Media, which purchased MediaLive, claims the term as a service mark for live events, reserving exclusive use of the term for its own conferences.

Some members of the development community see Web 2.0 as an overly vague buzzword, incorporating whatever is newly popular on the Web (such as tags and podcasts), without having any fixed meaning.
Note: for those keeping score at home, I fall into that third paragraph.

Put another way, Web 2.0 is really more of a mentality than a technology, and it didn’t have any kind of fixed launch date. Back in 1997 I launched a website called “The Other Arena”, which was really nothing more than the start of an online community built around professional wrestling. The idea around it was to look at more of the humorous side of wrestling, but to also provide an area where a community of people can get together to discuss whatever they wanted. That’s the important piece, because other “wrestling sides” had a very one-sided view of how the information should flow and be distributed. The mentality was that the wrestling community should discuss wrestling. Nothing more, or the discussion should be deleted. This was the purist view of the world, and over time the slow realization that overly-controlling your user tends to make them go away… and the fact that more posts mean more ad revenue ultimately brought it to an end.

Mostly.

The Other Arena was built around the whole concept that wrestling could get pretty dull and uninteresting, and I still wanted the user community to have a place to talk about something more interesting. The site was initially built around message boards, but quickly ramped to include polls, commenting (which was really an early form of blogging), and various user-generated content features. Today this all seems pretty standard, but back in the 90’s it wasn’t just not the norm… but was reacted to by a decent amount of hostility by other web owners. Granted, some of it was just jealousy as the site grew pretty quickly, but there was another element to it that fell into the realm of traditionalists versus grouchy upstarts.

The best part about a “Web 2.0” approach from the business side of my brain is that you’re basically getting content for nothing. By enabiling the user to push their own material up, you’re not only giving the user what they want but you’re also entertaining (and growing) your community. This is exactly why it took so long for this concept to resonate with the minds of the web community, but it’s also the reason why it is now growing so quickly.

Early web was a lot about control… controlling the information and making sure that what you’re presenting is representing you in the best possible way. Once people started to give up on those ideals, the road is there for rapid development and deployment. Granted, that’s a somewhat cynical way of explaining it all… but it sums up where a lot of people’s heads were at six to ten years ago.

Like anything though, “Web 2.0” is still too limited. This time, it isn’t technology that holds back the community, but the culture. Disruption still remains a constant fear of companies, who aren’t really keen on opening their revenue streams completely to the users. There’s also still a fear (which wanders between valid and paranoid) that any site which opens itself up to fully utilize user-generated content will quickly degenerate into porn, pedophilia, terrorism and other nonsense. Well, there is some truth there, but once a site achieves critical mass then the parts of the community who aren’t into chaos defend their territory.

In this way, the users who create the content become your ally in multiple ways:

First, they are the ones feeding your whole enterprise and making you that sweet, sweet cash while you sleep.

Second, because these people are investing time into your project, they are loathe to walk away from it. This is one of the main reasons MMOs work so well as subscription applications: even if you hate Final Fantasy XI, canceling your subscription means walking away from that Level 75 character you spent four months of your life getting.

Third, by making it all about the user’s value you position the user to be extremely protective of the whole place. Distruption to a web site effects everyone; so your users will actively work to prevent it just as hard (or harder) than you will. Consider Wikipedia… every day some fool writes a bunch of racist crazy nonsense into the site, and every day their members correct it. The webmaster, meanwhile, sits in Cabo and thinks about girls.

So, there you have it. Web 2.0: all about empowering your community so you can leech off of them while you think about girls.

Now… how can we fit that on a bumper sticker?