For a long time, I used the term “Web 2.0″ only grudgingly. Then I became completely fed up with what I saw as a needless amount of empty hype, and refused to use the term entirely. I even penned a short piece of satire on it, something I rarely indulge in, called The Emperor’s New Web. I waxed eloquent — or, at the very least, I waxed — on how empty, hollow, and useless the “web 2.0″ label was.
Certain applications of the term still annoy me, but at some point, I think that I and the majority of the “web 2.0″ naysayers basically just accepted that the term was here to stay, and gave up. How did this happen?
- Who: I think that who was endorsing it had a lot to do with it.
- Tim O’Reilly, for one, was a huge in building excitement and attempting to define and develop what Web 2.0 was/is. His conclusions and thoughts on the subject left a lot of room for disagreement and debate, and contained a fair bit of ambiguity as to what should or shouldn’t be considered Web 2.0, but all the same, they were widely distributed and influential.
- Paul Graham. The YCombinator founder/LISP evangelist/rogue Essayist wrote one of his essays on the topic of Web 2.0. It still comes up as one of the top 10 results in Google if you search for “Web 2.0″. His essay could be considered as “Anti”-Web 2.0 is some of its conclusions, but at the same time, one of his main points was that Web 2.0 acquired meaning, rather than remaining a buzzword.
- Kathy Sierra wrote a well-reasoned defense of the Web 2.0 label, aimed squarely at those of us who dismissed the term as a meaningless buzzword. Ouch. I can’t speak for others, but her essay is the one that convinced me to stop wasting time being a Web 2.0 hater; I think she was right. For better or worse, the term was here to stay, and since it seemed to have grown some meaning and associations, it had actually become useful.
- The Blogosphere, the Masses, Silicon Valley, the Enterprise; in other words, everyone else. Simply too many people had accepted and begun to use the term. It had acquired a momentum, a critical mass, that was simply unstoppable. We naysayers had become somewhat like a bunch of little malcontents shaking our fists at a behemoth that no longer even noticed or cared that we existed. In other words, resistance was futile. Be assimilated.
- Some of the more prominent naysayers just gradually disappeared. Most noticeable would probably be the anonymous author of the erstwhile Dead 2.0 blog, who ranted and raved (quite well, I thought) against Web 2.0 for quite some time. Then his blog went into a “we’re redesigning… we’ll be back soon” mode for a long time. Now I get a timeout error when going to dead20.com. I’m sure that the term “Web 2.0″ still has its detractors, but they seem to have become sidelined to a role similar to that of the grumpy old hecklers on the Muppet Show who just don’t like anything.
- What: This was a big part of the problem, I think, and was at the core of the controversy between the advocates and detractors of Web 2.0 — the question, What is it?. To some, it was the Next Big Thing, beautiful, exciting, interesting, full of possibilities. To the other group, it wasn’t anything — or, it was anything you wanted it to be, which amounts to the same thing.
So, what happened there? My estimation is that through attrition, and through constant use of the term by its most ardent proponents, it acquired meaning. Even if it did start out as virtually meaningless (and I think you could propose that it did), people began to agree on what “it” was. Once that happened, it was over. If you see something, and you like it, you’ll call it whatever everyone else is calling it. That’s nothing too profound, but I think that’s exactly what happened.
- Where: Just to continue the the “5 W” theme, I’d say that you could argue that at least one or two particular “where’s” were significant. In my considered opinion (it doesn’t take a brain surgeon) those would be Silicon Valley and Boston. In Boston you had the very small but very well-known Y-Combinator funding a lot of little startups which were arguably Web 2.0-type models. And Silicon Valley… is Silicon Valley. If the people with the money and the ideas start buying into something and funding it, it’s over. It’s here to stay, at least for awhile.
I’m going to stop there, because I think “When” is impossible to guess (though for me, as I said, it was about the time Kathy Sierra published her aforementioned post about Web 2.0), and “Why” is basically what this entire post is about. Like it or hate it, Web 2.0 is what it is, warts, occasional silliness and all.
