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The term “Web 2.0″ returns nearly 100 million search results on Google. But what is it really? Can you look at something and say definitively that it is Web 2.0? And does it matter? In this post we explore these questions in some detail - but to properly frame the discussion, we must start with a related question. What was Web 1.0?

A Brief History of the Internet

In the early days of the Internet, everything was text. There were no browsers as we think of them today. Using the Internet was a lot like using the Linux command line - extremely powerful, but not practical for the majority of people. There were a number of early systems - such as Gopher, WAIS and Hypertext - and each had its following. But everything changed with the introduction of Mosaic in 1993. Using Hypertext became a point-and-click operation, and the World Wide Web was born. The other systems faded away.

The Mosaic browser was eventually superseded by Netscape Navigator. Netscape sought to use its dominance in the browser market to establish a market for its server products. In Netscape’s estimation, control over the standards for displaying content on the Web would give the company the kind of market power enjoyed by Microsoft in the PC market. This fact did not escape Microsoft which soon introduced a browser of its own - Internet Explorer. And so the browser wars began.

Netscape was the very definition of a Web 1.0 company. It sought to build the “Webtop” ( as opposed to the Desktop ) and use that to push content to Internet users. This one-way flow of information is the defining feature of Web 1.0. Many Web 1.0 companies were built around the idea of web content as the outcome of a large up-front investment. A lot of these companies still struggle to adapt, even today.

The seeds of Web 2.0 were planted in the collapse of the dot com bubble, when such upfront investment was no longer easy to find. Young entrepreneurs sought to build businesses that not only leveraged data, but created it.

The Conversation

To a large extent, the shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 was caused by a change in the way Internet users interacted with each other. Personal web pages, once popular on free sites such as Geocities, became blogs hosted on services such as Blogger. Blogger provided simple identity management and allowed users to comment on each other’s pages. It focused on what users wanted to do most - communicate.

As Internet users began to communicate directly with each other, companies that survived the dot com bubble - such as Ebay and Amazon - reinvented themselves around the idea that users themselves could be leveraged to create valuable web content with very little overhead. Many Web 2.0 companies are formed around this same model.

Of course, the best example of the Web 2.0 shift is the rise of the social networks: Friendster, MySpace and Facebook. These networks focused exclusively on making it easy for users to interact with each other and include their friends. Facebook took the lead by offering a platform that let freelance developers create small applications and widgets that could be shared among many users. Just as the users were creating the content, the developers were making Facebook a more engaging experience.

Today, such multi-directional information sharing has become the expected norm. Interoperability is key and nearly all social networking services are now interconnected. Users can post Flickr photos to Facebook with the iPhone and get comments sent back to them via Twitter. New services that do not interoperate begin to lose relevance almost as soon as they are released - thus the trend towards SaaS - Software as a Service.

The diagram below illustrates this point, mapping popular websites and services onto a map of the Tokyo subway. It’s an insightful metaphor.

This distributed conversation between users and services, along with the parallel trend of user centered design, is the essence of Web 2.0.

So What’s Next? Web 3.0?

Although the term Web 2.0 itself is the matter of some dispute, we can build a clear enough picture of what comprises Web 2.0 to begin discussing the future and Web 3.0.

As information becomes more accessible, it is also becoming more highly structured. Having a well defined structure allows units of information to be manipulated like variables in an equation. Projects such as Google Wave, Wolfram Alpha, and the Semantic Web seek to make the web computable, or in other words, machine readable.

Humans can easily carry out a task such as searching for a lower priced DVD because the information needed to make decisions is designed to be readable by humans. Once knowledge becomes computable by machines, tasks like this can be accomplished without human direction. Tim Berners-Lee, the scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web, said it clearly in 1999:

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

Today that vision of the Semantic Web is closer than ever. If current trends continue, the primary outcome of Web 3.0 will likely be great strides towards Artificial Intelligence.

Summary

To return to the original question, it’s not easy to say definitively whether something is Web 2.0 or not - but it’s not that important. What is important is that a generalization can be made about projects that share the common themes of Web 2.0: information sharing, interoperability, and user-centered design. Projects that share these themes are moving forward into a future of more accessible information. Projects that don’t will find it increasingly hard to keep up.