There’s been a lot of press lately about Web 2.0. All of the hype aside, I think that is a terrible name. In my mind, the web can’t be versioned and by putting a number on it you cause people to set certain expectations.
For me the web is fluid environment that adapts itself constantly to what is going on. To a person “browsing” the web, it shouldn’t matter if your website is built on rails, or if it using .NET or J2EE. Paul Graham has talked about this in several of his essays. The main idea of having your business on the web is that you can change your back end as often as you need to without impacting your customers.
Right now people expect certain things to happen when they “upgrade” a piece of software. They expect new features, better UI’s, etc. etc., and whatever else the PR machines tell us will be great about the new release. A lot of people will get the PR worm stuck in their ear whispering to them “Wait for the next version…”
When that happens people stop moving forward. Look at Internet Explorer. So many people are afraid to move to FireFox or other browsers because they believe that version 7 is just around the corner and it will bring a newer, brighter, sunnier day. But that isn’t guaranteed.
The promise of the web is you don’t need to sit around waiting for the upgrade to be released, instead the upgrade finds you. Suddenly the website you shop at is faster. A bug that used to effect your recommendations is fixed and now you are getting better suggestions.
A system like that can allow something really interesting to happen. Instead of hyping up whatever awesome groundbreaking feature a company has in development (and is scheduled for release any day now), a company can talk about their roll out last week and how it has made life better/easier/simpler/faster for its customers.
And that’s what Web 2.0 is all about, the delivering the results now, not talking about what you are going to do. If you need examples of companies that live this every day, check out Amazon (Mechanical Turk, A9, etc.) and Google (gmail, Google Earth, etc.). Rarely do you see press releases from them talking about what they are going to do, its usually press releases about what they have done.