Web 2.0 — mirage, distraction or gimmick?

Plenty of people have taken a run at the whole Web 2.0 thing — the question of whether the term is a load of bollocks, a useful concept or just marketing hype — but if anyone should have some perspective on it, it’s Marc Andreesen. After all, he’s the guy who gave us the first browser when he was still a university student (I can still remember when I first used Mosaic), and then went on to form Netscape, arguably the first Web company.

The only other guy who might have even more perspective on the whole Web 2.0 mess is Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the Web in the first place, and who has made his thoughts known in a couple of different places, including a podcast with IBM (transcript here) — and in an interview with yours truly from the W3 symposium in Banff recently. In effect, Tim (he says that anyone who uses the Sir has to buy a round of drinks) and Marc both agree that what we call Web 2.0 is really just the Web as it was meant to be. In other words, all of that interactivity and so on is just the way things were supposed to work in the first place. It’s just easier now.

As Marc points out, it’s telling that even Tim O’Reilly — the guy who came up with the term in the first place, in order to sell the idea of a conference on the topic (which he famously trademarked, causing a minor blog storm) — has a lot of trouble defining exactly what Web 2.0 means. Dave “Mc500 Hats” McClure takes his own run at doing it in a comment on Andreesen’s blog, but doesn’t really fare much better (although it’s shorter).

Does Web 2.0 refer to tools like Ajax? Is it just a term that means interactivity? Is it an approach to design? Does it mean community? Is it a load of bollocks, a useful concept, or marketing hype? That answer to all of those questions — and more — is “Yes.” Web 2.0 means everything, and nothing.