Tim O'Reilly's new essay on What is Web 2.0 has a lot of great insight and summarization in it. But, it firms my commitment to the idea that, other than as an forward thinking attitude among enthusiastic web technologists between 2002 and early 2005, "web 2.0" is now nothing more than a term for the popular technologies / technology-business of the recent year or so.
From my point of view, I'd say: it's web 2.Over! But, taking into account that I tend to be a bit impatient with these things, maybe it's more accurate to say that web 2.0 is, at this very moment, just jumping the shark.
So, is there any popular technology not included in Tim's essay? Let's see: BitTorrent: check. Tagging: check. AJAX: check.
OK, Tim's essay has a few business ideas, like the long tail. Let's see, I wonder if that is a popular topic among technologists? Yep: check.
My main critique here is: "web 2.0" is now a purely retrospective concept. It has little to do with a "next generation" future, other than in the sense that what has been popular in the recent past will likely continue to be so in the near future.
I would probably only have positive things to say about Tim's essay were it more like a "what can we learn from this past year". There are things to learn from the things Tim is talking about, and I'm glad he wrote what he did.
But, I'd look to the future in terms of what we can learn from web 2.0 (i.e., the recent past). Web 2.0 is not the future of the web, though, obviously, folks who are making money off of these things now presumably would like it to be.
While I'm on this topic, I want to mention that danah boyd has recently written some great stuff about web 2.0 in her Why Web2.0 Matters: Preparing for Glocalization and Why Web2.0 Matters, Round Two posts. Whatever I think about web 2.0, Tim's and danah's essays are good reads and I recommend them.
As I've mentioned in the past, I've not been opposed to using the "web 2.0" term to talk about certain things. But, to me, the validity of the term would be in its relationship to some clean definition in some domain. And, Tim's essay, IMHO, suggests that "web 2.0" should be understood as the current Humpty Dumpty quote of popular web technology (not unlike "tagging" before it).
(Also, I recommend Richard MacManus' Read/Write Web blog as a source of good info around the web 2.0 topic. His recent Web 2.0 Elevator Pitch is more what I mean when I suggest that the web 2.0 term could be useful to talk about certain things, given some clean definition.)
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