Web 2.0 means a lot of things to lot of people.
I was in a meeting with a Sr. Director and her team of a Blue Chip company's Corporate Communications department. I asked what Web 2.0 meant for each one of them. Blogs, movable type, Photo sharing, video sharing were the answers.
In a recent talk at TIECON on May 18th, 2007, Tim O’Reilly (Founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media) presented a slide on what Web 2.0 meant for most people. The slide contained words such as User Generated Content, Sharing, Openness, Blogs, Wikis, Social Networks, etc. Tim jokingly said that we might as well as add “Peace” and “Love” to the list. And everyone had a good laugh.
The concept of “Web 2.0” originated in 2003 in a discussion between O’Reilly and MediaLive International. Dale Dougherty, web pioneer, is often credited with Tim O’Reilly for originally coining the word. Tim and Dale were discussing the dot-com burst and were looking at the companies which survived the collapse. They felt that these surviving companies had something in common. They felt that the dot-com collapse marked some kind of turning point for the web and the surviving companies represented the second generation of web companies and hence “Web 2.0”.
DowJones VentureOne’s research department released a report on the level of VC investment in Web 2.0 companies up to the first half of 2006. While the number of deals and amounts invested is very telling, the reason I bring that up here is to quote the yardstick by which they have included certain companies as Web 2.0 companies.
“Companies included in this study have a business model that revolves around a dynamic interface facilitating participation through such methods as user-created content, networking, and collaboration. Applications used include podcasting, tagging, blogs, social networking, mashups, and wikis. Technologies used in these applications include: AJAX, RSS, SOA, CSS, XHTML, Atom, and rich Internet applications.”
McKinsey Quarterly, a business journal of McKinsey & Company, released a report in March 2007. In this report they have a sidebar called “What’s in Web 2.0”. And they include the following nine terms –
Blogs, Collective intelligence, Mash-ups, Peer-to-peer networking, Podcasts, RSS, Social networking, Web services and Wikis.
Let’s look at just these two definitions by two industry leading research firms. Do they have anything in common?
Watch this space for more.......
