The Next Web
Wednesday, January 18th, 2006 by Mike Rundle
Jeffrey Zeldman just wrote a fantastic piece on this “web 2.0″ stuff over at A List Apart.
Many people have tried to define “web 2.0″ as social networking, or technology-infused user experiences, or whatever, but to me, “web 2.0″ is this:
While the dotcommers were making really cool stuff in the late 90s, younger people like me (middle school, high school) were idolizing them and aspiring to run dotcom companies once we got a bit older. Now that we are older (19-25 or so), and have witnessed the demise of the dotcom era, we’ve vowed to make even better dotcom companies that kick way more ass than our idols ever kicked.
Basically, my generation saw what happened, learned from it, and is now having a crack at it. We’ve collectively come up with some really cool stuff (Ruby on Rails, popularizing AJAX, etc.) and are trying to one-up the dotcom companies from the late 90s in many ways — in business planning, customer communication, interface design, technology implementation, and many others. Web 2.0 could be considered the collective “me too” spoken by young people who were too young to participate in the dotcom boom of the 1990s, and are now ready to take on the world in the 2000s.
That’s my definition, what do you guys think?
Reader Comments
11 Responses to “The Next Web”
Sure, and tags — don’t forget tags!
January 18th, 2006 at 2:07 am
web 2.0 is harnessing collective knowledge and folksonomies of the masses to leverage new technologies and social blog networking tag GTD wiki blah. .
Good business models will always work, empty models will always fail. end of sentence.
January 18th, 2006 at 2:41 am
Haha, good stuff guys.
Sam, a truer statement has never been blogged.
January 18th, 2006 at 2:42 am
Perhaps you’re giving your (our?) generation too much credit. It’s not like the 90s guys have dropped off the face of the planet.
January 18th, 2006 at 12:46 pm
I hear ya Fred, but it seems to me that the people who were innovating a few years ago (Bowman, Shea, Cederholm, even Zeldman, etc.) have motivated a younger class of designers and technologists enough that these younger people are now trying to out-do the people who got them started.
Yes, the people who had successful dotcom companies are still out there, but now it appears they are delegating more than they are creating. And who are they delegating to? Younger people like you and I. I’m not saying that all the 90s people are out in left field somewhere, I just thought it worth noting that many of the up-and-coming companies/apps out there are run by young 20-somethings and not the older 30-somethings :)
January 18th, 2006 at 12:59 pm
I agree completely Mike, but perhaps only because I’d consider myself in the same group as you. :-)
January 18th, 2006 at 1:09 pm
Totally. We’re not repeating history, in regards to dot-com busts (blow outs, bursts and meltdowns), but rewriting it, as well as avoiding pitfalls, right now as we speak.
However, this applies to any age group or generation that takes an honest look at past mistakes and attempts to recognize what went wrong or simply do things better. It’s a revolving cycle and will continue for years to come, as I’m sure even now there are certain processes that could be accomplished more effectively.
January 18th, 2006 at 1:28 pm
Yeah! I’m still working on my “me too”. Should be done summer of this year. Great post!
January 18th, 2006 at 2:28 pm
Why not use the web2.0validator.com to see how people define what Web 2.0 is?
January 18th, 2006 at 6:07 pm
Sounds like exactly what Zeldman was ranting against. I didn’t find his article terrible informative though, certainly not an ALA quality piece.
January 19th, 2006 at 11:41 am
Well, this describes in detail what I think about it.
I don’t really see Web 2.0 being related to the “younger people” like you and me. Many of the big Web 2.0-famous sites of now may have been started by younger guys, but Web 2.0 as a concept was created entirely by people most definitely from that “old dotcom era.”
What Web 2.0 means for me is simply a rehash of our approach to the Web as a medium, leaning a bit more towards the business-side of things than any other.
The advent of CSS-based designs spurred on a lot of creativity, new concepts were born and the Web started to see heavy innovation again. Nearly all of them involved some technology or another, whether new or a new combination of existing ones. The buzzwords for these technologies have spread far outside the realm of web developers who created them and who use them to make their lives easier. Now that they’ve spread outside that realm, the Web as a medium is being hyped again. It’s just Web-evolution, I guess.
January 24th, 2006 at 12:33 pm
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