One foot in the future

Web 2.0 is the latest buzzword but, asks Jack Schofield as we celebrate the web's 15th birthday, what does it mean and how is it different from what has gone before?

Fifteen years ago, Tim Berners-Lee was developing the first web page, the first web server, and the first browser - all of which ran only on his own machine at Cern, Europe's particle physics research centre. The web was seen as a good way to share mainly academic information. By 1995, the web had about 20 million users and was already being used for entertainment and shopping, but what really brought it to worldwide attention was Netscape's initial public share offering (IPO). The web might appeal mainly to geeks, but clearly there were millions to be made. And, of course, lost.

Well, the venture capitalists and corporate takeovers are back. Google's IPO, late last year, showed that there are still millions to be made, and some spectacular deals have followed. Indeed, eBay paying $4bn for Skype, a tiny company with revenues of only $7m, would have stunned people even before the dotcom crash.

Much of the new investment is going into companies that are leading the way in what is being called Web 2.0. No one is quite sure what that means, but it is certainly the most fashionable label to slap on any cool new website or, more importantly, venture capital request. But before you invest your pension fund in its future, keep in mind that it could also mark the start of Bubble 2.0. The websites may be new but, as Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter Research points out, "the business models are still built the old- fashioned way".

Is history repeating itself? Microsoft seems to be trying. In 1995, the software giant responded to the threat of Netscape by announcing a U-turn on the internet, and this month, it made a similar response to the threat of Google. Bill Gates swapped his "tidal wave" metaphor for a "sea change" as Microsoft announced new Windows Live and Office Live websites and an increased interest in online services supported by advertising.

As in 1995, Microsoft was announcing things it couldn't deliver, but the launch signalled that its programmers were being mobilised for battle. However, don't for a second imagine Microsoft is going to stop licensing its software. All its programs will get an online service component, but as Gartenberg says, "it's about extending [Microsoft's] traditional application models, not replacing them with something new."

Mercifully, Microsoft managed not to mention Web 2.0, a label coined by Dale Dougherty at O'Reilly Media to describe a new generation of sites and services that use the web as a platform. The idea has been developed most effectively by the publishing company's founder, Tim O'Reilly, who launched the first Web 2.0 conference in October last year.

Principles and practices

Following some brainstorming at FOO Camp, an invitation-only conference, O'Reilly wrote the defining document, What Is Web 2.0, published on September 30. This lists seven "principles and practices" that usually feature in Web 2.0 sites from "The Web as Platform" to "Rich User Experiences" - and that's the problem. Different sites can qualify by offering one or more Web 2.0 features but still have nothing in common.

And as O'Reilly admits, many Web 1.0 sites also espoused the same principles: "Netscape promoted a 'webtop' to replace the desktop, and planned to populate that webtop with information updates and applets pushed to the webtop by information providers who would purchase Netscape servers." As a result, it's all too easy to exploit the Web 2.0 marketing buzz whether a website qualifies or not.

That Web 2.0 has more to do with marketing than technology helps explain the negative reaction of real geeks such as Joel Spolsky, chief executive of Fog Creek Software and an influential blogger. "The term Web 2.0 particularly bugs me," he wrote. "It's not a real concept. It has no meaning. It's a big, vague, nebulous cloud of pure architectural nothingness. When people use the term Web 2.0, I always feel a little bit stupider for the rest of the day."

It's hard not to agree. Certainly O'Reilly was a bit too generous about Bill Gates's arrival on the scene. He went to Microsoft's Live press conference in San Francisco and reported: "Microsoft is fully engaged with thinking about what I've called 'Web 2.0'. They are focused on the internet as the platform, on software as a service, on creating rich experiences across multiple devices, on live update as a metaphor for both software and documents, on grassroots adoption as a result of user conversations. They are also very clearly focused on advertising as a new business model. We're hearing all the Web 2.0 buzzwords: RSS, Ajax, social networking."

However, it is a mistake to think Microsoft has just adopted the idea of software as a service, or suddenly discovered advertising. Microsoft has offered Hotmail, messaging and online photo albums for years, and according to chief executive Steve Ballmer, sells online advertising worth almost $2bn a year. This is less than Google's $6bn, but it's not a trivial sum.

Also, in many respects, Microsoft must see Web 2.0 as deja vu. For example, Microsoft is enthusiastic about RSS (Really Simple Syndication) but it is very similar to the Channel Definition Format that Microsoft and the late Pointcast launched with Internet Explorer in 1997. Microsoft is also keen on Ajax, a kind of lightweight programming, but it can claim to have invented it.

Nor is there anything new about offering applications online. Microsoft, IBM and others have spent years trying to sell Office as an online service, and it has been a resounding failure. Whatever Web 2.0 is about, it is not reinventing the mainframe.

But for Microsoft, Web 2.0 does involve reinventing or at least retooling its own web services platform,, launched in 2000. Microsoft's idea of making the web machine-readable was right, but at the time, the company was being hauled over hot coals by the US Justice Department for abusing its monopoly power. When Microsoft announced .Net My Services, aka HailStorm, users clearly did not want to trust it with all their data, or hand it an online monopoly to add to its monopoly control of the desktop.

People are now starting to think about the similar Big Brother potential of Google compiling so much data, but at least the search engine giant comes across as a user-friendly company, and its motto is "Don't be evil". If Microsoft really wants to copy Google, that would be a good place to start.

Collective intelligence

As for the positives of Web 2.0, there is clearly something exciting and potentially revolutionary going on. Compare, for example, personal home pages on websites such as GeoCities (Web 1.0) with blogs (Web 2.0). Compare the Encyclopedia Britannica with Wikipedia, or Ofoto with Flickr, or DoubleClick (which serves banner ads) with Google AdSense.

Where Web 1.0 was mainly a publishing medium, Web 2.0 offers more flexibility and interactivity. Instead of static pages, Web 2.0 sites provide user interfaces that are more like simple desktop applications - or, indeed, are online versions of simple desktop applications.

Examples include the Writely word processor, Numsum spreadsheet, Zimbra (like Outlook) and the 37signals cluster of Basecamp, Backpack, Writeboard and Ta-Da List. Their appeal is that you can use them anywhere there is a working internet, and they allow you to collaborate with other people online.

Indeed, Web 2.0 feeds an explosion in what O'Reilly's article calls Harnessing Collective Intelligence. In other words, users are intimately involved with building the sites and systems they themselves use. People don't just buy books from Amazon, they rate them and write reviews, compile lists, and resell their own books. People don't just upload photos to Flickr, they tag and re-use other people's pictures in all sorts of creative ways. Wikipedia's readers are also its writers, and so on.

Again, all of this isn't strictly new: people were doing cooperative work on the internet before the web was invented and Berners-Lee had intended to create a read/write 15 years ago. But perhaps the time for collective and cooperative online communication has finally come - that, at least, would explain Microsoft's eagerness to scramble on board the bandwagon.

Sites that define the new era


Google's Gmail launched Web 2.0 to the masses - at least the ones with invitations. Instead of using pages refreshed from the server, like Hotmail, it downloads code to your PC to provide a quicker, richer user experience.

Google Maps

Transformed online mapping by using Ajax-based programming to let users pan around and zoom maps without having to wait while a whole new web page is downloaded.

My Web 2.0

Yahoo's experimental personalised search engine lets users tag and comment on web pages, and share them with friends, so the results depend to some extent on the people you trust.


Not just a boring list of books, but a community site where users contribute reviews and recommendations. A programming interface allows Amazon data to be used on other sites.


Allows you to view, group, tag and re-use your own and other people's pictures. Third-party applications use Flickr photos to make postcards, montages, slideshows, etc.


Allowing anyone to edit almost any page, it is the acme of online collaboration. Its variable quality has made it a focus for attacks on Web 2.0. As Xeni Jardin wrote on Wired News: "When you invite the whole world to your party, inevitably someone pees in the beer."
