The Social Media Reader

4. What Is Web 2.0? Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software

32 | 4 What Is Web 2.0? Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software Tim O’Reilly The bursting of the dot-com bubble in the fall of 2001 marked a turning point for the web. Many people concluded that the web was overhyped , when in fact bubbles and consequent shakeouts appear to be a common feature of all technological revolutions.1 Shakeouts typically mark the point at which an ascendant technology is ready to take its place at center stage. The pretenders are given the bum’s rush, the real success stories show their strength, and there begins to be an understanding of what separates one from the other. The concept of “Web 2.0” began with a conference brainstorming session between O’Reilly Media and MediaLive International. Dale Dougherty, web pioneer and O’Reilly vice president, noted that far from having “crashed,” the web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity. What’s more, the companies that had survived the collapse seemed to have some things in common. Could it be that the dot-com collapse marked some kind of turning point for the web, such that a call to action such as “Web 2.0” might make sense? We agreed that it did, and so the Web 2.0 Conference was born.2 In the year and a half since, the term “Web 2.0” has clearly taken hold, with more than 9.5 million citations in Google. But there’s still a huge amount of disagreement about just what “Web 2.0” means,3 with some people decrying it as a meaningless marketing buzzword and others accepting it as the new conventional wisdom. This essay is an attempt to clarify just what we mean by “Web 2.0.” In our initial brainstorming, we formulated our sense of Web 2.0 by example (see table 4.1). The list went on and on. But what was it that made us identify one application or approach as “Web 1.0” and another as “Web 2.0”? (The question is particularly urgent because the Web 2.0 meme has become so What Is Web 2.0? | 33 widespread that companies are now pasting it on as a marketing buzzword, with no real understanding of just what it means. The question is particularly difficult because many of those buzzword-addicted start-ups are definitely not Web 2.0, while some of the applications we identified as Web 2.0, like Napster and BitTorrent, are not even properly web applications!) We began trying to tease out the principles that are demonstrated in one way or another by the success stories of Web 1.0 and by the most interesting of the new applications. 1. The Web as Platform Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn’t have a hard boundary but, rather, a gravitational core. You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core. Figure 4.1 shows a “meme map” of Web 2.0 that was developed at a brainstorming session during FOO Camp, a conference at O’Reilly Media. It’s very much a work in progress, but it shows the many ideas that radiate out from the Web 2.0 core. Table 4.1 Web 1.0 Web 2.0 DoubleClick Google AdSense Ofoto Flickr Akamai BitTorrent mp3.com Napster Britannica Online Wikipedia personal websites blogging evite upcoming.org and EVDB domain name speculation search engine optimization page views cost per click screen scraping web services publishing participation content management systems wikis directories (taxonomy) tagging (“folksonomy”) stickiness syndication 34 | Tim O’Reilly Fig. 4.1. Web 2.0 meme map For example, at the first Web 2.0 conference, in October 2004, John Battelle and I listed a preliminary set of principles in our opening talk. The first of those principles was “the web as platform.” Yet that was also a rallying cry of Web 1.0 darling Netscape, which went down in flames after a heated battle with Microsoft. What’s more, two of our initial Web 1.0 exemplars, DoubleClick and Akamai, were both pioneers in treating the web as a platform. People don’t often think of ad serving as “web...