The prediction of Web 2

The prediction of Web 2.0's demise was made by Christopher Mims, a research commentator who writes for the MIT journal Research Review. He started by typing Web 2.0 into Google Trends search engine. This shows that usage of the term peaked in 2007 and that it's been going downhill ever since. Mims at the time extrapolated the downward trend until it hit the X-axis on the chart. QED.

As it happens, Web 2.0 does mean something, although the definition gets a bit fuzzy round the edges. It first appeared in 1999 however didn't actually gain any traction until the publisher Tim O'Reilly and his colleagues were brainstorming a title for a conference they were organising in 2003. The basic idea behind the event was to challenge public perceptions that the collapse of the 1995-2001 internet boom implied that the web was a busted flush. So they decided to call the conference Web 2.0 and launched the meme upon an unsuspecting world.

Having done so, they at that time had to come up with a definition for it. The nearest they could get to one was the notion of the web as a "platform" - ie a basis on which software and applications could be built. So if the internet itself was the platform on which Web 1.0 - the first version of the Web as a simple publication system - was built, straightway Web 2.0 was the platform on which new, innovative applications could be built.

What kinds of innovations?

What kinds of innovations? So then, social networking services just as MySpace, Orkut, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Image-hosting services like Flickr. Online mapping systems just as Google Maps and OpenCycleMap. Cloud computing services like Google Docs, Zoho, Instapaper, Dropbox. Wikipedia. When all is said and done on, ad infinitum.

Web 2.0, that is, became the underpinning for much of our online environment. Even as it did so, but, we lacked a succinct description of it that would make sense to lay people. The nearest we got was David Weinberger's description of the new web as "small pieces, loosely joined". In a memorable 2005 essay, the programmer and entrepreneur Paul Graham decided that three things distinguished Web 2.0 from its read-only predecessor: a programming innovation called Ajax, which could turn any web page into a small virtual computer; a democratic attitude which persuaded many web developers to make their services interoperable with those of others; and the realisation that the only way to be successful was to take in all seriousness the needs of users.