What does Web 2.0 mean?

The only thing is the pool. We have to kind of stay out of the pool because it makes a lot of noise when we're trying to uh, trying to record a podcasts really stir Josh and Chuck and the electricity incident. We really don't want to get in net pool anyway. So let's talk a little bit about a subject that I find endlessly entertaining. Sure, Web two point oh? The heck is it? Is it? What we think it is? Doesn't mean anything? Where am I? Where do I live? What?

I'm sorry? I just I kind of get off on a whole series of questions there. Web two point oh

can mean a lot of things. But I can tell you what it meant when it was coined, and the person you have to think or blame, depending on how you look at it, I think in general, probably think would be O'Riley, the publisher, O'Riley vice president Dale Doherty, who came up with the idea, uh, basically back in a retreat that they were talking about different things, and essentially what he meant at the time was these websites survived the dot com crash, and this is why because

they had they sort of had a common set of characteristics that people still wanted to use, right right. What sort of qualities set those companies apart from the ones that collapsed dot com crash? Sorry I'm interrupting. These guys had a business model in a lot of cases, and some of them didn't, which helped them along. Let's talk about the dot com crash a little bit before we get into web two point. Oh so, let's let's cast our minds back to the mid nineties. Okay, but I

can't throw very far. I've kind of a wimpy arm. Right, Well, your brain doesn't weigh that much, so I think you'll be able to get some more distance than you think the back in the mid nineties. The web is relatively new.

You know, the web really started coming out in the early nineties, UM, and companies were just starting to kind of get a presence on the web, and we started seeing companies that with existence that existed outside the web make an entry first, right right, So, like you know, it would be some recognizable brand creating a website as a way of marketing that brand. Now, at the time, no one really knew the most effective way of doing

it because it was so brand new, right right. And in addition to a lot of a lot of companies thought it was just a flash in the hand. They didn't see a whole lot of value in even bothering with it in the first place. Well, and I can kind of understand why, because at the time it was really a niche thing that at that time. Again, college students were probably the number one consumers of the web when it first came out. UM and then people in research facilities think people who are using it as a

means of actually communicating their their work to one another. Uh. And so in those early days, you might have thought, if you were if you were a corporate executive that, uh, why would we market directly to these people. We can use television and print marketing the way we've always used it. Um, this web thing is never going to go anywhere. Of course,

that was not the case. The web exploded, and during that explosion, a lot of people got this kind of cool idea, like, what if we built a company that was founded upon the web. Web itself was the face of the company, the interface between company and customer, and will provide either a product or a service, and the web will be the way that we uh that we present that to to the average customer. And a lot of different companies sprung up using this idea. Everyone's thinking,

this is going to be the future. Everyone's gonna buy everything online, um and uh. And before you knew it, companies were popping up in in the dozens every single day, and you had lots of investors interested in this idea pouring money into these these companies um that had either no business model, an unproven business model, or at least at the very least no proven revenue, right, I mean they I've heard more than one person referred to the early days of the web as sort of a wild

West scene. You know, to overuse a cliche, but um, you know, essentially, you know, it kind of was like that people were in such a hurry to to to claim their territory, to to come to the web with a brand new idea or at least, you know, one that they could take ownership off before everyone else got to it, that they didn't really think through things very

well well. And and these a lot of these little companies did not need the massive amount of investment that they received, and in a way that actually ended up hurting them. You get a company that what might need let's say a hundred thousand dollars investment in order to to really get off the ground and work, and what's instead get a million dollars of investment. And so the person righting the company be like, well, great, now I

can hire tons and tons of people. And you ramp up faster that before you've even built an infrastructure, So before you've built the basic structure for your your business to rest on, you are going into full swing. And a lot of these companies could not maintain that momentum. And in fact, you got to hear stories about how people were going to be paid in in stock options because these companies were doing crazy amounts of of you know,

the the amount of money being invested into into them. UM. Some of the ones that went public, their stocks rose

dramatically overnight because everyone was interested in it. I mean, the initial public offering or i p OH for some of these companies was massive, and and in the weeks immediately following UM, some of the people who had stock options, and some of the very early pioneers of the Internet, some of the ones that are still around, especially the ones who've had real staying power, they made quite a bit of money just on the stock options that they

were granted as part of their UH incentive packages. Right now, if you were if you were to make a ton of money off this initial UM Internet boom, this initial web boom, the best way for you to have made money off this would be to get tons and tons of stock and then almost immediately sell it off because because the real problem was that as the reality set in that these companies were not generating revenue and therefore not making a return on the investment that had been

poured into them, the companies began to collapse. Now the stock became worthless, and so people who were paid in stock essentially made nothing. UM or or close to nothing, and a lot of these companies went away and only a few, uh by relative means anyway, survived. Now, those companies that did survive were the ones that that Dougherty said, we're web two point o companies. These were the ones that did something differently than the ones who died out,

and that's why they were able to stick around. So the the task at hand at this this conference was let's look at these companies, see what sort of things they did differently, and then that is what we will now define as being what is required to be successful a successful company on the web. Yeah, and uh, over the years, I think people didn't necessarily understand what what he meant, um because web two point out of the term web two point I was kind of gotten hijacked

and almost now is synonymous with social networking. Yeah, and that's that's simply because, Um, their earliest websites were basically one way websites. The publisher would put them up on the web, and I mean about the most interaction you had with it was, you know, if there was an email address on there for you to reply to, you could you know, send the author an email and let them know what was going on but there were really wasn't any embedded interaction of any kind, and the content

on that site in general tended to be static. So you had an animated gif alright, But the what I mean by static is that it did not change. In other words, if you visited it in May of nine and then you went back in March of of and the web page was essentially the same page because there was no you know, it wasn't dynamic at all. It

would just stay the same. There wasn't really any incentive to go back to that web page, right, And a lot of companies hadn't really figured out how to leverage the web in such a way where you were providing useful information and a useful way for customers to interact beyond just saying, hey, this is who we are and this is what we do, especially not in a way that they could monetize and and try to make a

business out of. So let's talk about you could put anything you wanted to on there, but if people weren't coming back and they weren't buying something from you, you really weren't getting anything from it. A matter of fact, if you were paying for hosting, then you are paying money to read your content. For them to read your content and not getting anything in returns, that really isn't a particularly practical business model. Now that's that's what we

call a bad business model. Let's talk about one that actually ended up being a good business model, although it took years for it to turn around. And I'm talking about Amazon dot Com. Yes. Now, Amazon was one of the companies that Alerty would point to and say, this is an example of web two point oh, and I would agree, even though it was a company that took years for it to really start making enough money to

to start and being a return on investment UM. One of the things that Amazon did that really helped out early on was Amazon allowed its users to post reviews of products. Yes, and this was a an interactive way where customers could get involved in the process and it it it added value to Amazon dot COM's service, and because of that, it was able to survive the dot com crash, or that's part of why it was able

to survive. The fact that it that customers valued that particular part of the service, as well as the fact that they could use it to to shop for whatever it is they wanted UM meant that they would come back to Amazon dot Com and actually use the service, as opposed to some of these others where you visit once and then you're like, well that was cool, but

there's no reason to ever come back. Another thing that Amazon had in its favor is the algorithm on the back end that enables uh, the software running the site to identify not only what you have bought, but it helps you It helps match up customers that have bought the same thing and make recommendations to you. So suddenly there's a reason to go back and shop because you go, yeah, you know, I really like this one book, but you know, I don't know, I don't really know what I want

to read next. And Amazon dot Com could say, well, you know what, other people who bought this book bought this book too, and you you know, read the description of it and read some of the reviews, and you know, you know what, that really does look good. And of course they expanded into many many other markets as well. But you know, just it's an experience where you go to shop, you get an idea of what people think about the product, you get an idea of other things

that you could buy along with it. That's, you know, the add on sale and retail terms. Um, oh, hey, you're buying this, other people like this one, why don't you buy both for especially discounted rate. Um. You know that that really helped them survive and and thrive really

in the in the post dot com crash market. Um. And it also sort of spawned what Wired um editor Chris Anderson called the long tail, because suddenly you were finding items in the back catalog, things that may have even been published years ago, um, that other people liked,

and suddenly those items were starting to sell. And it wasn't just the top ten of of you know, just the best sellers, it was pretty much anything that that Amazon carried, and um, suddenly they were able to compete with the brick and mortar stores the world, which basically were just carrying stuff that they knew they could sell right now. So UM, that was definitely a good example of that. Yeah, and uh, getting back to the dynamic ver sycstatic, this is also when we started seeing things

like trends like blogging really start to take off. Blogging is another good example, and that it's if you go to a blog, then that that content changes sometimes on an hourly basis, depending on the blogger, but at least like if you visit a blog a couple of times a week, you'll notice that there's new content up. Um blogging was one of those things that really attracted people to different websites. Again, it gives you a reason to

return to the same site over an over again. It's not just that you know you don't you don't go there just whenever you need something specific. You go there because you're interested in the bloggers point of view and you want to see the latest information that that person has to offer. Um also the whole Wisdom of the crowds notion. This is another one of those things that came out of the whole web two point o. And we touched on it with the Amazon dot Com stuff

and the user reviews. But another, of course, another great example of that would be all the wikis, including Wikipedia, and these are websites that have become successful because they build a community of users and they rely upon the users to provide content. So you're no longer just creating content and serving it to people and telling them that's

what they want. That's the Steve Jobs method. What you're doing is you're allowing the community of users to create the content that they do want and that they're all providing their own point of view and their own expertise to kind of to build it up over time. Now, this is not always success. Well, there are problems that come up because we're people, and people tend to have different ideas of what's best for any given situation, and some of them have agendas and you know that can

come into play too, But the basic idea is pretty sound. Yeah, no, I was, you know, the idea of user generated content folksonomy's crowdsourcing, you know, getting everybody into the act instead

of just the content producers. Um. Again, Anderson said, you know, computers democratized the act of creating content, and the Internet basically democratized the act of, uh of distributing that content, and suddenly everybody's you know, creating videos to share on YouTube and taking other items and mashing them together to

make new things. Um. Then you have you know, the interactivity sites where there are you know, games and and things that you can do ajax and the other a p I s that allow you to, uh to make individual sites much more interactive and and functional than they used to be for the user. And you can customize things, you know, portals, um, where you really have control over the content RSS feeds to bring to incorporate your blogs

into a reader. Yeah, you can syndicate your blog feeds and aggregate them in one place, um, along with weather and traffic and stock reports and all that stuff. You know. It's it just makes those sites interactive, you know, and to the point where, uh, you can you have a reason to come back to them every day, and there there is a way to keep you there. Um. You know,

Facebook certainly has found a way to do that. Yeah, you've actually touched on something else that I thought I would mention about Web two point oh, and that part of the whole idea is that you can access the web through multiple um means not just sitting at your computer, but on say a cell phone or smartphone right or tablet device or whatever. Um. That's another important part of

web two point oh. A good web two point site would be accessible through multiple forms of electronic devices, so that way a person can consume that product or service or whatever however you wanted to find it, um in the way that he or she prefers. So you might have certain people who for example, Twitter is a great example okay. Some people prefer to use Twitter just by going to the Twitter website, reading the updates, and occasionally

updating from there. Some people prefer to download a client to their computers so they can keep up with Twitter updates throughout the day. Some people prefer to only interact with Twitter through some sort of handheld device like a phone, where they've either got a Twitter client on there, or they're actually using the Twitter Phone API where they can uh, I can update through text messages. UM. I don't know anyone who does that specifically because it tends to eat

up your text messages pretty quickly. But I'm sure there are people out there who do use that. I have done that on occasion, but that's it's a good example there. Twitter has really got the right idea as far as giving users the most flexibility to to access that service as possible, or Twitter kind of is still you know, questionable as the whole business model angle. Um. Some of these companies have great business models where they are clearly

making plenty of revenue. UM. There are other companies where the business model is either emerging or still kind of murky, where we're not really sure if they figured out a

way to monetize what they do. Uh, that's one of the downsides of some of the folks who are on the web is that they've got these great ideas of ways of providing really compelling services or websites or whatever, but they don't have the business expertise to find a way of actually leveraging leveraging that to make money beyond

the initial investment. Sure, so I can get investors to pour money into it, but again, when we look back at the dot com crash, if you don't find a way to generate revenue so that you can repay those investors, then it just becomes a borrowing game until people are no longer willing to lend you money. And once they've figured out that you don't have a viable business model and you're not making money, all you're do is spending millions of dollars, they're not exactly likely to continue funding.

It becomes kind of like a pyramid scheme. You have to keep asking more people to pay money so you can pay back the investors from the previous round as well as keep going. Yeah. Yeah, that that gets scary really really fast. And in fact, a lot of us have felt that Twitter was kind of on that path, because, um,

everyone recognizes that Twitter provides a very valuable service. But until Twitter finds out a way of making money from that valuable service, it's a question of how long are people willing to pay money in the hope that eventually Twitter will get its act together and pay back investments. I'm not sure that everybody knows for sure that that's very well vluable service. I'm sure that all the people who have used Twitter and quit very early on in Twitter does have quite a few of them. We call

them losers users. We don't call them that. I call them users. Um, but no, I mean not everyone agrees on that. But that's that's one of the things about web two point. Now, there are plenty, plenty, plenty of sites that offer variations of different things, and there's generally a flavor that people will eventually hit on when they go, oh wait, I like this one a little better because

it's got it's it's orange instead of green. Um, So there's there's there's always somebody popping up with with a new site these days, but the trick is to get them to to stay on. And then of course people ask about web three point Oh right, Well, I think the big winner of web two point oh out of everyone is the whole idea of the social network, although ultimately you can say that the big winner is really Facebook,

at least for the United States. Um yeah, almost every other social network at this point in the United States isn't also ran, even my Space, which was ahead of Facebook for a really long time. And then there were a Friends too. Yeah, let's yeah, it's barely warranted a mention. Um, there's my yearbook dot com. Don't go there, so they But no, the this Facebook really definitely one out in

the long run. But the social networking idea, the whole idea of connecting people together so that they can communicate and participating games and that kind of thing, that really took off, especially after like no, I'd say two thousand four, two five, Um, that's when you really start seeing the social networks start to ramp up. And then once Facebook at the scene and that was what two thou seven when they went public with everybody, Uh yeah, then it

really exploded. So yeah, moving on to web three point what could that be? Well, the question is whether or not it's even a meaningful term. I I honestly think that at this point um. I think to some degree, web two point oh is a valid term, especially if you keep it in the concept of, uh what Dale

Doherty was thinking of. You know, these survived because they're viable, that they can they can support themselves to that end, I'm not sure there's ever really going to be a Web three point I mean, we've made so many improvements since the dot com bust, but those you know, improvements

have come gradually one by one. People sort of had their head screwed on straight, both venture capitalists and the people who create most of the uh, you know, the websites, the new style websites with interactivity and and and that kind of thing. I'm trying deliberately not trying to call

it web two point out. I mean, generally, it seems like most most websites have an idea of what they're you know, the the group of people that are trying to reach, the business model they're going to do used to sustain themselves, and you know, how they're going to

achieve their goals. And I'm not sure that there's a leap, a significant leap, where there's a demarcation between web two point oh and Web three point out that people are going to point back and go, oh, this this is actually when everything really changed and it's now web three

point out. I can think of a couple of possibilities, although both are well really I can think of one possibility, but it's really kind of a uh, you know, orwell again, fat chance kind of thing, which is that Web three point oh becomes Facebook is synonymous with web, or Google

is synonymous with Web. The idea being that you have one company that is so good at defining the web experience that it becomes the de facto definition of the web experience and slowly eats up everything else until anything else you would encounter on the web has to play

ball with that particular corporation. So, in the example of Facebook, instead of having web pages that you would go and visit, you would have all these ferent Facebook apps or Facebook fan pages or whatever you want to call it, uh to interact with different brands. Now, that would take years for that to actually happen, but I could see it happening if if, in fact, trends continued the way they do.

For example, the idea being that people are relying more on sites like Facebook to find information they want and ask their friends questions then they would going to a traditional search engine. They also have to beat out Google to get to that rule. Yeah, so Google and Facebook might eventually face off against one another, or one might try to buy the other one. Uh, that would be interesting. I do have a different concept of what three point oh might be. What's that the semantic web, that's a

great point. Yeah. Semantic web is where you start having some artificial intelligence in the network so that the web itself is respond ending very specifically to what you want to see, so that it's it's kind of learning about you as you use the web. It relies on a technology called Resource Description Framework or RDF and UM and XML, which is by a lot of people's terms successor to HTML,

although HTML five will probably call that into question. But basically, uh, the difficulty in turning things turning the current web into the semantic web is it requires people creating additional markup

for each page. Because what the semantic web is trying to do is um it takes two different items and puts them into a context, and that basically will help you match up your interests to the interests of other people and it makes connections very quickly or can but it also requires people to learn this new technology and implement this new technology. It will probably require new browser

technology in order to make that work. So it's not a pure, in simple, as we know it right now, web technology something that we can just throw into a website and make it work. It's going to take quite a bit of infrastructure managing in the back end. But it is something I mean, you know, it's Tim Berners Lee helps come up with it. So, I mean, it's a really neat idea that it would make the web more personal and more usable for a lot of people.

And in some ways there are some web two point oh websites that sort of incorporate the concept behind it, but it's not as efficient as purely what is described as the semantic web, which requires again a lot of markup on the back end. Right, So, first of all, Tim Burners Lee for those of you who don't remember as the guy who invented the World Wide Web. Yeah, so that's why why Chris was a name dropping there.

But the yeah, the the whole um concept does require lots and lots of work by human beings to make the websites smarter. For lack of a better term, it's smarter than quotes here right, so that you when you are searching for something, the well quote unquote knows what it is you're searching for. UM, as opposed to you know, the old search engines. You would put in some keywords and you would get a bunch of results, and the quality of your results would largely depend upon the quality

of the keywords you used. So if you didn't use the right keywords, or if used very generic keywords, you might get tons and tons of responses, but only a few of them would be relevant to what you actually wanted, and you'd have to sort through them all. With the semantic web, theoretically your search engine would be able to figure out exactly what it was you were looking for and return the things you wanted, and maybe even return some stuff that you didn't know about but it has

determined you would also be interested in based upon those keywords. Yeah, it would be uh, it would be a nice leap forward or something very useful I think for most people. But um, and nobody is just racing to get on that bandwagon. Yeah, just to kind of them. Well maybe not nobody, but few people are are racing it on that bandwag and I've seen some other predictions, things like the web three point o type thing would be more of a three D experience where you have an avatar

wandering through the web. I honestly don't think that's gonna happen. I don't think it's as efficient as using just very simple links. Um. It's much more time consuming, and while I can understand the science fiction appeal of it, uh, in practice, I just don't see it being very useful. And I think Second Life is a good example of that. The Second Life was adopted by a lot of people

and then abandoned by a lot of people. There's still people who use it and who still find value in it, but um, but for the most part, I think people realize that it's just not the most efficient way to navigate through the web, and even though it's kind of cool if you need to get something done, it's not

the route to go. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's one of those things where there are just too many people with too many different kinds of interests, and if there's no money in it for people, then they're not going to pursue it as a viable technology. And things follow by the way sign, right, right, But We'll keep our eyes open so if we do figure out what Web three I know it's going to be. If anything, we'll

let you know and hopefully will be making money on it. Now, if you have any ideas of what you think the future of the web is going to be, right, let us know. Are just as tech stuff at how stuff boards dot com. Remember you can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Just look for text Stuff h s W on either of those services and interact with us because we enjoy that and we will talk to you

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