I had the pleasure of speaking on a panel on Web 2.0 last week at the New York Software Industry Association (NYSIA) monthly meeting.
It was a fun panel, featuring Dennis Crowley from Dodgeball (now part of Google), Josh Schachter from Del.icio.us (acquired by Yahoo!), Bob Wyman from PubSub, which remains independent, and me. It was moderated by Howard Greenstein who did a great job of keeping the conversation moving.
At one point, I blurted out that Web 2.0 is an oxymoron. It had never occurred to me before, but at the moment I realized the irony of the name.
Possibly the greatest thing about these lightweight web services that we all now call Web 2.0 is that they are constantly updated with new functionality. It seems that every day I long onto one or more of them and find new features that have been rolled out without any effort on my part.
Contrast that with the traditional update cycle in software. Sometime this year Microsoft will roll out Vista and those of us who operate in a Windows environment will take time out of our daily lives to upgrade our operating system. It will be a painful process. Some stuff won’t work right after the upgrade. We’ll need to figure out how to navigate the new user interface. We’ll fumble around for days until we get the hang of the new software.
It’s even worse for the sys admins who operate large scale application software packages in corporate datacenters. The upgrade cycles for the technology that powers large enterprises is filled with dread and long nights getting the new stuff working.
It is the very naming convention (1.0, 2.0, 3.0) for new versions of installed software that we take the name Web 2.0 from. People are already starting to blog/think about Web 3.0 and what that will bring.
I think we should drop this version based naming convention on the Web because that’s not how it works best. The web evolves every day. There was no 1.0 and there is no 2.0 and there will be no 3.0. Just a long graceful road we are traveling where the scenery changes every day.