Or … what was it ?

Scarcely had everyone gotten themselves properly seated on the web2.0 bandwagon before everyone is talking about web3.0- and this while, as yet, nobody has a clue what web2.0 actually is (or is that was). Sorry Mike Stopforth, I really mean that nobody – so nothing personal buddy.
The usual citings about web2.0 are: community involvement/growth, RSS and sharing, tagging, blogging etc.

Yes, very new… oh wait it isn’t, none of this is new.
The concept of community based and controlled websites go back a long, long way… slashdot.org was probably the first really successful example and that’s been around since about 1995.
Blogging has been around in various forms for at least ten years, and was preceded before that by .plan files – nothing new, it’s just that a former geekpasstime has become more mainstream now.
RSS goes back a very long time, and Netscape had a syndication platform even before that going back a good 10 years.
Tags are a marginally new concept, the idea is nothing new – hashlists for the web. Community tagging – also not new.

So what is web2.0 ? The closest you can come to giving an answer is to say that it is a large number of technologies which have been prevalent on the web for decades, but only really spread into mainstream usage in the last three years.

Fair enough. So why on earth was youtube worth milions to google ? Especially when google now has to spend almost as much again to get rid of the copyrighted content which was the only reason youtube was popular in the first place.

Hype again.

Now me, I’m a bit of an older geek. I remember an event almost exactly like web2.0. It happened just as I was entering the industry. It was the new economy. It was going to change the way everyone did business. Geeks were suddenly social gods, scoffing at business leaders who were out of date, out of vogue and doomed.
Then one day, it all fell down flat on it’s face. The dotcom revolution became the dotcom bubble – in one day.

The venture capitalists figured out that if you don’t have a product, you cannot sell air. Information may have value, but appart from James Bond, nobody is actually willing to pay very much for it, unless it comes in the form of a big educational institution.
Wiki’s, tagging etc. are all great technologies, that really did make the web easier to get into and use.
But it is not some major change in the way the world, or the web works – and just like all those people who went from overnight milionaires to overnight streetbeggars, I predict exactly the same for everyone on the web2.0 bandwagon.

Or maybe that’s why their talking about web3.0 already ? Maybe some of them know it as well – and so they came up with web3.0 (which is even less defined than 2.0 – the usual definitions go ’something involving websites with artificial intelligence’) – this way, when the V.C.’s are ready to pull out, they can say “just wait, in a year it will be web3.0 – and we’ll finally make money”, and then in a year, they can have web4.0 ready to promise.

Companies that chase the rainbow, and survive by always being able to tell the venture capitalists – but look, there it is beyond the next hill… well what do you know, maybe some of those dotbomb people finally found an answer… you cannot sell air to customers, but maybe you can survive selling the promise of air for customers to venture capitalists…

Technorati Tags: web2.0, bandwagon, web3.0, youtube, google, dotcom