Web 2.0: The emperor's new code

Every time I hear the term “Web 2.0”, I throw up a little. The man behind the phrase, Tim O’Reilly, is a legend, sure. His publishing company, O’Reilly, is a thousand-megawatt leading light whose ideas I filch regularly. But, oh, what a turdy little storm he started when he coined the term back in 2004.

So what is Web 2.0? Even if you don’t speak geek, this is easy, trust me. Remember when you first went online 10 years ago? “Surfing the web” was like window-shopping. You’d read the news, wait endlessly for pages to open, search for porn in a flock of pop-ups and, occasionally, buy a book from a loss-making start-up called Amazon, just to see if it would arrive.

These days, you chat to your friends on Facebook, write a journal on Blogger, review the books you buy, and keep documents and spreadsheets on Google Apps.

The main difference is supposed to be this: for the average user, the internet used to be something for looking at; nowadays, everyone participates. We all add to the internet as we use it. Web 1.0 was passive; Web 2.0 is interactive.

Web experts like to say that the difference is more complex than that, and that a revolution has come about because of technological innovations such as Ajax and Flash and new business models such as Google AdWords, YouTube and eBay. These innovations, they say, have changed things so much that we need a whole new name for what we’re doing online.

Technologically speaking, the new name is meaningless, like planting an apple tree and calling it “Apple Tree 2” when it starts bearing fruit. The new technologies that appear to have heralded a new era have evolved gradually over time, each small advance leading in small ways to the next. And historically speaking, if we had changed the web’s version number each time it changed significantly, we’d be on about Web 6.0 by now.

I have no objection to using a new term to suggest that things have come a long way. There are countless senior managers in every industry who need to be reminded to invest in up-to-date IT and be open to new business models, and a buzzword like Web 2.0 can go far in a boardroom. But the term is also a fabulous opportunity for internet consultants to suggest that what they do is more complicated now, and usually more expensive too. Really it isn’t — it’s the same internet we had before, still budding tiny new bells and whistles every few days. Web 2.0 is an invisible bandwagon. It’s the emperor’s new code. And each time I see a web expert marching along in it, I have a chuckle at their dangly parts.