RERUN: What was Web 2.0?

another classic episode. Because I'm still on vacation, I will be back very soon, but today we're going to look back on what was a real big buzzword or I guess buzz phrase back in the day, which was web two point oh that was used to describe lots of stuff. It was a fairly vague term. So in this episode I go into explain what was web two point oh? What was the whole concept behind that. I hope you enjoy this classic episode what is web two point oh?

But I think we've had enough time since then to really take a look back and explore what the concept of web two point was and what if anything is taking its place, and does the term mean anything? Was it just kind of a placeholder. It's gonna be a lot of opinion in this because it's from my own personal perspective, but honestly, if you've heard the term web two point oh, and you always wondered what that meant.

That's what I want to cover today. But to start off, we need to look at a history of the web itself. And I'm sure you all know that the Web and the Internet are two different things, but just in case, let's lay down that groundwork. Now, the Internet refers to the network of networks, this gigantic network of computer networks that are all interconnected together. There's a series of connections

that allows computers to communicate with one another. So this is an enormous system that allows all kinds of different types of communication to go across it. And back in the day, we used to talk about the Internet in the terms of the information super highway. You might be

familiar with that term. So it was kind of the infrastructure that allowed rapid communication across the globe and allowed people who were on one computer network to communicate directly with people who are on a totally separate computer network because of this interconnectivity. Now the Web is just one way to send and consume information on that super highway. So you can think of it as a vehicle that shares the super highway with other vehicles. So the Web

would be like a giant bus. And then you might have a freight train that's or not freight train, but a freight truck that's driving right next to it. That's file transfer protocol, or a bunch of mail vehicles in a I L that would stand for email, that kind of stuff. These would all be traveling along the Internet. None of them are the Internet. They're just a means of communication that exists because the Internet is the platform upon which they exist. So you access the Web through

a web browser. Big shock there, I'm sure we usually refer to that as the client. Your machine with the web browser is the client, and the browser or client lets you request information from another machine on the Internet, which we call a server. The server receives your request in response to it sends the relevant data back to you. And all of that has done through a visual interface.

In other words, you've got something rendered out as uh, you know, something that's easy to to interpret and consume within the browser, as opposed to a text based approach that is, you know, marred by lots of code that might be really confusing to you. Now, the path taken by your request and the returning information isn't set in stone,

so this is different from roads. This is where the road analogy really breaks down, because if you have a set of roads between you and your destination, you might be able to take a detour, or perhaps two detours. If things are really bad, let's say there's flooding, you can't get to where you are going using your normal routes. But the way the Internet goes it's way more robust

than that. The information is delivered via packets. The packets all can travel different pathways to get to their destination, whereupon everything gets put back together and displayed for you. Now that's not just for Web information. That's for all information going across the Internet traffic. But it's uh one of the reasons why the Internet is so useful. It's that you don't have to worry if there is a break in the communication lines between you and the web

server because the data can route around. That very important if you have machines that are constantly going on and offline. So back to the web. Now, the birthplace of the World Wide Web is CERN. That's the same organization that oversees the large hadron colliders. So we're talking particle physics and loll cats all because of CERN. Thanks CERN specifically say thanks to Tim berners Lee, who developed what would become the basis of the Worldwide Web on a Next computer.

And uh, in case you're not familiar with what Next is or was, really, it was a computer platform developed by Steve Jobs after he had been forced from Apple. So Apple forced Steve Jobs out of the company or Steve Jobs quit, depending upon the person telling the story, and as a result, Steve Jobs then went on to found a new company called Next and develop a new

type of computer. Eventually he would come back to Apple. Essentially, Apple begged Steve Jobs to return just as Apple was on the brink of bankruptcy, and Next kind of faded away. But it was the Next computer that Tim burners Lee was using to develop web pages and the first web browser. In fact, the first website was built in nine by Tim berners Lee, and he hosted it on his own computer.

That site contained information about the purpose and structure of the web, so kind of an explanation of what the web would be capable of, and also a set of instructions on how to create your own web server, because obviously the web is only really useful if other people start to join on Otherwise it's just kind of a you know, you just logging remotely to someone else's computer. It's not that exciting now. The browser he built was

called Worldwide Web. Just where we get that from, and things continued along a lot of research centers and students began to get access to the world Wide Web. But things really took off on April three. That's when uh CERN decided to release the Web to the general public, meaning they made the information itself on how the web

works public and open. Along with the open license for the Web, SERN offered a basic browser and a library of code to help things move along, and it didn't take long for other organizations and eventually people and companies to join in. So also in three, the National Center for super Computing Applications or in c s A released Mosaic one point oh, and that became the first web

browser to really find popularity among the general public. At this point, most of the people using the web were still researchers and students, but gradually people outside of these groups began to learn of the Web. It started to get press coverage, and people began to get excited by this concept of a computer network that you could access and find real information and communicate with people in real time.

And here's a funny note. During this time, I was in college, and my first impression of the Web at that time was that it was slow, and it was unattractive and it was superfluous. I had become used to browsing the Internet using other means like tell net to connect to chat rooms or games or whatever, or even not full Internet access things like Bolton board systems, and I just thought that the graphical approach to the Web

was completely unnecessary and slow things down. The browser had to take time to get the information and render the stuff you needed to see, and at the time, the Internet connectivity and the power of computers meant that that stuff took ages. And I just thought, well, who wants to sit around forever to try and get this information when you could get it so much faster using FTP or tell net or whatever it may be, depending upon the kind of information you're interested in. So I thought

the Web was probably a flash in the pan. It would not be the last time I'd be radically wrong about the technology you think I'd learned. At any rate, by the Web was making headlines and e commerce became a thing One of the earliest examples I could find was that Pizza Hut sold a pizza online, actually allowing customers to order pizza in some areas using the web.

The company Yahoo was founded around this time too, and its main purpose at that time was to serve as just a search engine to help search for the content on the web, making it easier for people to find stuff they wanted. Before search engines, it was pretty tough. You had to be kind of you kind of had to be part of the click that understood how the web worked. Now today, we're all used to things like you r l s where you have to type in

a web address. In fact, there may be a couple of websites that you still navigate to by typing in the web address, but not everyone is comfortable with that. So search engines made it much easier for people to interact with the web without having to memorize the protocol that they would need in order to visit a specific website. Now, much later than the early nineties, we look back on the webs sites of this era as being pre Web

two point oh. For the most part, you could probably call them web one point oh, but that's what we call a retroonym, meaning we named it after the thing had already happened. Uh. And it's kind of like World War One. While World War One was going on, no one referred to it as World War One. There had not been a World War two yet, there'd be no reason to call it world War one unless you expected there to be another one, so you might use something else,

like the Great War. Uh. And it was only in in a you know, in retrospect, when World War Two broke out, that World War One really got that name. So what actually defines web one point oh? For lack of a better term, Not everyone even thinks web one point oh is is a thing at all? Like it? It doesn't make any sense, but some people will use that term. But wasn't actually described well. The websites in

those days. Most of them were actually static pages, which means you would navigate to a page and see what was there, and after doing that, there'd probably be very little reason to ever return to that page because it's going to be pretty much the same. Uh. It's kind of like the equivalent of a magazine or a book. You know, if you go and you read a magazine and you close the magazine, then you come back to it, and you open it up to the same page, it's

going to be the same magazine article. It doesn't change from one moment to the next. That's the way a lot of websites were in the early days. We're gonna make this episode even more dynamic and interactive in just a moment, but first, let's take a quick break. Those web pages didn't have any way for visitors to have any kind of meaningful interaction on the site. At most, there might be a visitor counter that would click up a notch each time someone navigated to the website, and

those were a huge deal early on. I don't know if you guys remember, but I remember lots of websites having a visitor counter, and they took it as a matter of pride when they passed a arbitrary milestone like five thousand visitors or something like that. But there was no way to leave comments or have any other impact on the site for the most part for these types

of web pages. Now there were exceptions. Some websites were dedicated to updating content regularly, or they were allowing people to leave their own contributions, or even both of those things at the same time. There was a student at Swarthmore College named Justin Hall who started up a web page, and originally it was just a collection of links that

he thought were particularly interesting. The website was called Justin's Links, and not long after he started the site, he actually saw the potential to do something more with it than just show a collection of links, and he saw it as a way to publish his thoughts to a global audience, kind of like an online journal, and a lot of people point to Justin's Links as being the first blog uh.

This sort of approach of using the web as sort of a dynamic communication tool set the side apart from a lot of the web pages that were around at the same time, but many sites lacked that sort of dynamic approach, and at the same time, companies began to rush the web in hopes of beating competitors to the punch. The web was viewed as kind of a Wild West type of territory in which a company could stake its claim online and stand to make a ton of money

in the short term before everyone else caught up. Simultaneously, several companies emerged that used the web as the very foundation for the company itself. Some of them offered goods or services to consumers, so normal people who are just using the web themselves. Others were targeting other companies and they were offering up services meant to help businesses succeed. But many of these lacked any sort of cohesive business plan,

which caused a big problem. They were offering up services that some people found helpful, but they didn't have any way of making money. And this obviously is not something that's just gone away. We've seen this with lots of different services, some of which exists solely as a means to try and get acquired by other larger businesses. UH, which can work if you have a great idea for a service or app that people are going to really enjoy using, but you don't have a way of generating

money from that. It might just be good enough to get a lot of attention and then wait for someone to offer to buy you. You know, maybe they'll figure out a way of using it, or maybe they'll pair it with stuff they already have, and that's how it makes money. But back then, not having a plan just

wasn't really working for people. Towards the end of the ninety nineties, web companies were sprouting up all over the place, and investors were really excited at the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of something that had the potential to become huge, meaning you could stand to become a millionaire overnight with some of these opportunities, and they

began to flood startup companies with cash. More than a few of those startup companies ended up with way more money than what they needed, and that encouraged some bad decisions on the part of founders. A lot of founders began to spend that excess cash by creating lavish headquarters or crazy benefits for employees. Meanwhile, their businesses still didn't

have a way of making revenue. So, in other words, let's say that you want to open up a lemonade stand, and normally you would just need a few dollars to buy some lemons and some sugar. You get some water, and then you put all that together. Maybe you get a little poster board to write up a sign. So maybe you're starting budget is twenty dollars and you're selling it for cents a cup, and you figure out that after certain number of cups, you know you've got plenty

of of of supply. There after certain number of cups, you're going to break even. Uh, and then after that's all profit and you've got enough to make a decent profit over your investment. Well, now imagine that you are opening up that lemonade stand, but someone's given you twenty thousand dollars and you don't have any way of scaling up your operation, so you just spend that extra money on a really nice lemonade stand and you know, a super nifty titanium lemon crusher, that kind of stuff. It

doesn't help you make money in the long run. It just means that's how you spent your your startup cash. A lot of companies fell into this trap. You can read about startups dot com industries in the late nineties and how ridiculously lavish some of their offices were, and it was a mess. So compounding that problem was the fact that a lot of these companies were rewarding employees

by giving them shares of the company. Now, if everything was working, fine, that's great, because those shares are worth real money. Once you get to a point where the employees are allowed to sell those shares, usually there's a period where employees are not allowed to do that sort of thing until they get to a particular point in

the fiscal year. But here's where the real problems came in, because a lot of these companies began to falter when people realized, hey, they don't really have a way of making money and they can only keep treading water with investment money for so long before everything falls apart. And it was like a house of cards. It all fell down, and it didn't all fall down on a single day.

It's not like there's a particular day you can point to and say this is the day the bubble burst, the bubble meaning this speculation bubble of the value of dot com companies. Instead, it happened over a course of years from nine thousand one essentially, and during that time, people began to get more suspicious of dot com companies

that began to ask harder questions. The companies themselves were starting to run out of that investment money, and because they hadn't found a way to generate enough revenue, they couldn't stay afloat, and a lot of them went completely out of business. Some of them took serious hits to their value. Amazon dot Com, for example, was around in those days and for a while had shares that were in the triple digit value, like over a hundred dollars a share, but after the bubble burst it dropped to

less than ten dollars a share. Huge drop. But companies like Amazon were large enough and and savvy enough to wade through that time and emerge out the other side. Not all companies were so lucky, And the worst part of this is that those employees who had worked so hard and had been rewarded in stock now found themselves with worthless stock. The companies were bankrupt, so the shares were not worth anything, and that was a huge issue.

So you had all these people who, for a while on paper were millionaires and then suddenly they were broke, or at least they weren't millionaires anymore. Many dot com companies went on to business um and those that stayed around people wanted to try and figure out, well, what what set them apart, what made them different? How did these companies survive, How did these websites make it through the dot com bubble burst while so many others went away?

And that's where the term web two point oh really comes into play. Now. Personally, I think it's a dumb term. It's terrible. It suggests a chronological order, so it would suggest that there was first Web one point oh and then at some point there was a Web two point oh release. Because it's very similar to the way we look at software, for example, we're operating systems, but that's not what this means. It's not the way it works. So I think it's ultimately more confusing than helpful. But

that's what we have, uh. And the truth is that both websites that were more in the Web one point oh frame than the Web two point oh frame and Web two point o websites existed at the same time. In other words, this wasn't chronological. You can't point to a date and say after this time all the websites were Web two point oh. Even back in with Justin's links, we start seeing Web two point oh philosophy working its way into websites, and that was years before the dot

com bubble burst. So it's problematic using this term. But at any rate, we need to look at what actually happened, like why is this term around in the first place, And that's because of the O'Reilly Media company. So in two thousand four, Tim O'Reilly, who was the founder of O'Reilly Media, and Dale Dougherty, who was a VP and O'Reilly we're having a brainstorming session. They were trying to come up with a an event that could really focus

on what makes a web company successful? Why were some web companies able to survive while so many others failed. What were the mistakes that the older websites made or the failed websites made, and what were the success stories? And so they started trying to think, well, how are we going to define this, what's the what's the way we create a catchy term to explain the new philosophy of the web, the one that survived. And that's where they came up with the term web two point oh.

And that was it. It was just to give a name to a summit, the Web two point o Summit, which took place in two thousand four, and they had several since then. But they just wanted a way to say, these are the type of websites that did all right throughout the dot com by verse. These are the ones

that had the traits that allowed them to survive. Now, in general, the qualities that define web two point oh are that they tend to be dynamic pages rather than static ones, meaning that there's a reason for you to go back and look at it again. It's not something that's going to be a page out of the encyclopedia and it never ever changes. That makes it Web two point oh. Another is that there tends to be some way for users to generate content and submit it to

the website. That may be something along the lines of blogging, where the users are journaling using the web page as a place for their journal to go. Or it might be social media site where they're just reaching out to friends or sharing links or stories or jokes or whatever.

Or it might be something more akin to Amazon, where users are able to review products that they've purchased, and that adds value to Amazon because us future customers can look at those reviews and make judgments, and then they too can contribute to this system, and that makes the whole experience of using Amazon more pleasant and robust and useful to both the company and the consumer. These are the sort of things that became known as the web

two point oh qualities. This dynamic approach with user generated content, stuff that could be syndicated and be sent out across multiple platforms. All of that was wrapped up in this, and like I said, it does in fact cover things like social media sites. If you look back on the timeline of the major social media sites, they all emerged

after the dot Com bubble burst. There really weren't any sites that kind of fall into that social media category the way we think of today pre dot Com bubble burst. Some of them were around right around then, like live journal, but even then you would you could argue live Journal was more of a blogging site and less of a social media site. Things like Friendster and MySpace and Facebook, all of those emerged after the dot Com bubble burst.

But they also embrace the philosophy of what O'Reilly was calling web two point oh because those sites they aren't valuable on their own. I mean, you don't go to Facebook to see what Facebook has put up. You go to Facebook to see what your friends are saying, or to say something to your friends. It's the people who are using the site that give it value, and that's a big part of web two point oh. It and in fact, it takes a lot of the pressure off

of the person creating the website. They have to make it attractive enough for people to adopt it. But then you just let the people make it important and you step back. Same thing is true for Twitter. Twitter just facilitates communication. It's the people using Twitter that make it useful. If no one jumped on Twitter, it wouldn't be around.

There are other services that were similar to Twitter, some of which people thought were superior to Twitter, but they didn't get adopted as quickly, and they, for the most part, are not around anymore. While we're on our journey to Web three point oh, I guess let's uh, let's take arrest here. We're gonna take a quick break to thank our sponsor. So Web two point oh kind of points to this idea of embracing the consumer as a an integral part of your web presence. They're not just an audience,

They're a contributor in some way. And you could argue the web two point oh isn't so much an evolution as it is just a different approach to creating an experience on the web, which also makes it difficult to talk about what comes next. I mean, is there a web three point oh? Does that even mean anything? Now?

I would argue that we definitely have seen more evolution on the web since O'Reilly coined the web two point oh term, particularly when it comes to stuff like data tracking, that's huge, way bigger than it was in the mid two thousand's. Because of data tracking, sites can customize a user's experience and serve up advertising that is calculated to be more effective for that user. And depending upon the implementation,

data tracking can be downright scary. And it turns out you don't have to share that much data before a computer can figure out who you are. Stuff that seems really general, like just a zip code, can be enough to narrow down just a few candidates. So if I put my zip code in and I have just maybe two or three other points of data, that might be enough for an algorithm to really narrow down between me and maybe one or two other people who I could

possibly be. It's actually pretty, you know, surprising, how little information you need to share for that sort of stuff to happen. Also, we know that data tracking can be misused, either intentionally or not. There's the story about Target sending the young woman uh some a young woman some some coupons for expected mothers, and her father found out about it and was really upset at Target because he thought

they had misidentified her. His daughter as being pregnant, and then later on he found out that in fact she was pregnant. But the whole point of that is that Target was trying to be proactive and helpful, but in fact caused a ruckus. It was a little too overenthusiastic of a response, as it turns out, and that's largely due to data tracking. You don't even have to identify a person or to create a problem. It's not like

Target knew specifically who this young lady was. They just identified that based upon our searches, she must be pregnant. That's a problem. And we're seeing data tracking used and everything from innocent or at least seemingly innocent approaches like, well, you bought this one product, so here are five other products that you will probably like based upon your preferences that we've seen so far. That's not that creepy, But there are other approaches where data tracking is downright sinister.

And I would argue that's a major part of the web experience now, whether you're aware of it or not, but it's definitely something that has evolved since Web two point oh. But another real jump in the evolution of the web comes to us because of mobile devices. Now. O'Reilly recognized the importance of mobile devices all the way

back in two thousand four. O'Reilly Media said that interoperability was one of the features of Web two point one of the cornerstones of the philosophy, meaning that you should be able to access this web page from multiple platforms, whether it's a computer or a mobile device of some sort or something else. Now, in two thousand and four, there were really not that many devices that you could use to connect to the web non in a meaningful way.

A lot of the phones that were out there were more like, you know, they have text browsers for the web, so you could read some text on certain web pages. It was pretty limited. It wasn't until the smartphone really took off here in the United States. That means it was after the introduction of the iPhone that you really started seeing that. So you get to a point now where more and more people are using mobile devices to

access the web. I meant that web developers had to make sure they were paying closer attention to the mobile experience because if they ignored it, then a larger portion of their audience was going to get upset with how how clunky or unpleasant it was to access the website using a mobile device, and in fact it's more important than ever now. Uh. Just recently we've seen mobile browsing outpace desktop browsing. In other words, more more website visits

are coming from mobile devices than desktop computers. That happened for the first time about a year ago, a little more than a year ago, and now we're seeing that more people are using mobile devices to access the web. Now, that doesn't mean that people have slacked off of using desktop computers or laptops. People still are using those devices. In fact, if you look at the trends, they're still

increasing year over year. So in two thousand fifteen, there are more people accessing the web on desktops than there were in two thousand fourteen. It's just that the growth of mobile devices has skyrocketed, so it has outpaced the growth of desktops, so both of them are up. It's just mobile devices have increased much faster than desktop has. But that means you have to pay attention to the experience that your customers have. Your audience has both on

mobile and on desktop. You want to make sure that it is attractive and usable and that people are able to get the experience they want depending up. You know, no matter what platform they happen to be using, whether it's a tablet or a smartphone, or a console or uh desktop computer, it needs to be a satisfying experience. So I would argue that is now really a defining

feature of the web. And if I had to define web three point oh, I'd likely argue that it has to do with both the data tracking and the mobile devices more than pretty much anything else. But web experiences are becoming more customized to the individual browsers. So that could mean that one day will move into the era

of the semantic web. Now, the semantic web is where your experience will be very much personalized, and the web itself will understand what it is you want to see based upon context, word choice, your preferences, all of these things that are wrapped up in things like data tracking and understanding of natural language, that kind of stuff. We're

seeing a lot of development in that area. So maybe one day we'll have a semantic web where when I talk about surfing the web and when you talk about serving the web, it will be two very different stories because of our different styles. That's a possibility, but I also think it's really likely we're gonna see the web experience fracture as more services attempt to leverage various platforms. Now what do I mean by that? It's starting to sound like I'm talking business talk. But here's the simple

example that I'll use to illustrate my point. Think about Netflix. So net extreaming has seen a ton of success over the past few years. Put aside their their library of movies and television series, which obviously mean that's that's problematic, but the adoption of Netflix has been phenomenal, and I would argue that our large reason for that is because you weren't limited to computers or mobile devices to access Netflix. You can access it on set top boxes, on video

game consoles, and more. Pretty much if the device was capable of connecting to the internet. Netflix made sure it could have some kind of platform on that device. They wanted to get on everything they possibly could, and it meant that they had widespread adoption. Beyond that, they were really smart on the back end. They built out a system so that you could have a kind of seamless

experience moving from one device to another. So if I start watching a movie under my Netflix account, on my laptop computer, and then I come home and I turn on my video game console and I launched my Netflix app. I can pick up where I left off because on the back end, it's tracking everything. The same is true for other services like YouTube. It's another great example. There are YouTube smartphone apps and tablet apps and video game console apps, and uh, that's the same sort of thing.

My experience on one can translate over to another so that I can keep on building out this profile of what I like, and YouTube will continuously suggest other videos that are similar to ones that I've really enjoyed, which might be why I have so many videos of dogs on skateboards, or that could just be coincidence. I don't really understand how it works behind the scenes. At any rate, it's really interesting to me that that could potentially be

the new era. It's not so much a Web three point oh as it could be a let's, you know, let's look at how we can make our service across all different platforms so people can access it however they want, and that goes beyond Web. In fact, Web might be too limited a term to use for that sort of thing, which means we kind of need a new term for it.

We need to come up with a word that explains this particular world one where you have these services that go across all sorts of platforms, allowing you to access it however you like. And I think I've come up with a name. I'm calling it Frank. Frank's nice name. Robin Day's got a hedgehog called Frank. But seriously, I'd rather just kind of ditch the web two point oh term altogether, which might be a moot point. I don't know that anyone's still talking about web two point oh. Seriously,

it's kind of a non term at this point. But I'd like to just erase it because I think web two point oh was too confusing a term. I think it misled people. It It compares the Web to things like software patches or software versions, and that's not accurate. Um, I really wish we could come up with a different phrase for that particular the idea that doesn't suggest an evolution, because it really was kind of a divergent path, not so much that one evolved into the other, but one

approach was more successful than the other. I hope you

guys enjoyed that classic episode of tech Stuff. If you have any suggestions for future episodes, you can contact me, write me at tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or pop on by our website that's tech stuff podcast dot com that has links to our social media presence, also has links to the entire archive of all of our episodes and a link to our online store, where every purchase you make goes to help the show and we greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again

really soon from more on this and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff works dot com. M