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I’ll admit it: whenever I see the phrase “Web 2.0″ used, my countenance changes, a wall goes up, I assume several unkind things about the prescience of the writer, and I prepare to disagree.

On the other hand, one could make a case that “Web 2.0″ hype is to a great degree a creature of Tim O’Reilly, a man who makes his living by understanding what he’s called “alpha geeks” — early adopter, uber-geeks, the bleeding edge, whatever you’d like to term them. In other words, he has a history of being prescient, and of being more or less correct.

Before I go on, despite my dislike for the term “Web 2.0″, I can concede that there is a new-ness to a subset of the web applications of the last year or so. Some of them have design stylings in common, others have architectural models in common, and still others have only certain flashy technologies in common (coughAjaxcough).

All that being said, I don’t think there’s anything “new” here, and any attempt to define or discuss the “Web 2.0″-ness of “Web 2.0″ only serves to make that more and more obvious.

I probably disagree with Tim O’Reilly at my peril, but for what it’s worth, here goes.

I just read Tim’s somewhat recent post called Levels of the Game: The Hierarchy of Web 2.0 Applications. Sounds good, right?

For those too lazy to read (or re-read) the post, here are the levels and Tim’s examples in a nutshell (whoops… I hope “in a nutshell” isn’t trademarked…):

Level 3: Apps that could ONLY exist on the Web. Tim’s examples: EBay, craigslist, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Skype, and Dodgeball.

Level 2: The application could exist offline, but it is uniquely advantaged by being online. Tim’s example: Flickr.

Level 1: The application can and does exist successfully offline, but it gains additional features by being online. Tim’s example: Writely.

Level 0: The application has primarily taken hold online, but it would work just as well offline if you had all the data in a local cache. Tim’s examples: MapQuest, Yahoo! Local, and Google Maps.

Level 3, it seems, is the Highest type of Web 2.0 application. Level 0 seems to be the lowest form of Web 2.0, but apparently it still qualifies for some weird reason (because we can’t accuse Google Maps of not being “web 2.0″).

My first problem with the hierarchy is that there is no web application whatsoever that does not fit into it. What, I must ask, is the point of coining a term like “Web 2.0″ if every web application and tool that has ever existed fits into it? How is that “2.0″? Far from being a small issue, I think this is a good question: what is the benefit of categorizing something as “new” if everything old is also part of the “new”?

Next, I’m afraid I have to disagree with Tim’s categorization of Web applications. For example, Level 3 — apps which could only exist online. For me, that describes the entire world wide web. It could ONLY exist online. Sure, you could theoretically have volumes of hyperlinked documents stored on your local PC, but the whole “web”-ness of the web was that it was continually growing and changing, that anyone could contribute, and that any and every resource could be linked one to another — in short, all the hype which the internet, particularly the web, generated when it burst upon the public consciousness in the mid to late ’90s.

But what does it mean to say that an application can “only exist online”? By that qualification, email qualifies as a Web 2.0 killer app; sure you could read mail offline, but without periodically going online to send and receive, it’s useless. It can only exist online. And exist it has, since — when? The late sixties or early seventies?

Then on the other hand, Tim gave Writely as an example of Level 1 — apps that exist offline, but can be enhanced by the web. To me, this is the wrong comparison, the wrong way to look at the value of Writely. Writely is explicitly a web-based word processor. As such, it can only exist on the web. Without writely, I could certainly write in Word or OpenOffice and email copies of documents to myself. That’s handy, and no doubt many of us have relied on that method for editing documents in different locations. But compared to a web-based application that simply saves it online and leaves it there, emailing copies starts to seem old, clumsy, crufty, and a bit of a nuisance. In that sense, I do not agree that Writely “could exist offline” — an offline Writely would be another version of Word. It would lose it’s killer feature.

When it comes to mapping applications, I would say the same thing. Take Google Maps offline? Sure it “could” exist — and in a sense, it did. It’s called Microsoft Streets & Trips, and you can buy the newest version for $130 bucks. The value in GoogleMaps is that it’s free, and it exists online independent of my needing to install anything. Obviously that’s not the only value; the API is also incredibly valuable, and that too would lose its value if GoogleMaps were offline. Again, I’d argue that these apps could not exist offline — not without losing the main features that make them valuable and compelling.

What is new?

Someone who is really excited about Web 2.0 might just say that I don’t “get it.” I would say that I do “get it”, and that yes, it is very cool — but it’s not a whole new version of the web. That is, after all, what is implied by “Web 2.0″.

If you’ve been following my argument, you’ll see I’m still implicitly admitting that some of these new apps are indeed new and different than what’s been offered before. In most cases, what’s “new” are the implementations of old ideas.

Everybody likes to make fun of Ajax — but only just as much as we like to see it employed effectively. It’s fun to say that all a web app needs is a pastel logo, a beta label, and some Ajax to become “Web 2.0″-ified, but the truth is that Ajax makes web apps more responsive, more intuitive, and therefore more usable. This doesn’t necessarily make the applications themselves groundbreaking or brand-new — it just means they’re a notch better than their predecessors (and I do think that “more usable” == “better”. That’s why vi proponents and emacs disciples will always be battling; each believe their editor of choice to be more usable).

Social-networking is another buzz-phrase that has been inextricably linked to “Web 2.0″. Again, I don’t think this is new. Slashdot is a social network. Heck, we can reach further back than that: the BBS was a social network. Usenet is a social network. IRC is a social network. This is not new — it’s just become more mainstream, more accesible, and more usable. To which I say, Great! But let’s not call it the New New Thing.

Because it’s not new. It’s just the Web, the same old Web, doing what it’s proponents have always said it would do: constantly getting better.