14th
Web 2.0: not a sector and not an activity
I can be amused by semantic debates, especially in cases where people somehow confuse semantics with some kind of universal, moral truth. One prime example is the age-old question “what qualifies as a sport”? … which is clearly a purely definitional question that somehow nevertheless inspires heated passion about the level of required physical skill/exertion or the presence of a ball or of teammates or some other equally arbitrary criterion. (My definition, just for the record: any competitive event where the main criteria for winning are basically objective. I recognize that this definition has few adherents.)
One semantic debate that hasn’t interested me very much, however, is the notion of “Web 2.0”. I’ve been asked what “Web 2.0” means by people inside and outside of the internet sector, in private and in public, and I usually try to explain that it’s a poorly-defined term usually used to refer to a collection of internet trends including various kinds of open platforms, user-generated content, collaboration, blah, blah blah.
I’ve seen intelligent people argue about details of the definition of Web 2.0, but I see it as a concept for which an imprecise definition doesn’t hamper its usefulness. If you want to use it to describe some back-end stuff and focus on things like, e.g., AJAX, fine. If you have a predilection for user-facing features like tagging and WYSIWYG interfaces, great. If your thing is abstract strategic frameworks about platforms and network effects and the like, knock yourself out. So, if you tell me that “old media companies are starting to embrace Web 2.0”, you’ll have to flesh out your idea, but I know where you’re going.
However: there are, IMO, very un-useful places to use the term, and one of these is as a descriptor - or, even worse, a category - for companies. If I’m looking at a company summary and it says “StartupCo is a Web 2.0 company that…”, you’ve just wasted 7 characters and made me suspicious that a lot of what I’m going to hear will be meaningless marketing babble.
Even worse is when I look at a list of internet startups and there’s a category column that says Mobile, Search, E-commerce… and Web 2.0. That tells me absolutely nothing about what the company actually does. “Search” and “e-commerce” and “social network” and “gaming” are useful descriptors that tell me, albeit at a high level, to what kind of consumer activity the company’s product relates. “Mobile” isn’t quite parallel to those, but at least it tells me something about the industry within which the startup will operate. “Web 2.0”? Useless.
So, as someone who spends a lot of time looking at internet startups, here’s a plea to conference organizers and those writing marketing copy: don’t use Web 2.0 as an adjective for a company. As a subject for a keynote, great; to describe trends, fine. … but when you describe a company, please tell me something about what the company’s product or service actually does.