Oct 18 2005
What is Web 2.0 and what’s not?
I’ve been following the whole Web 2.0 thing over the last few weeks and getting quite excited by the sense that stuff is starting to happen on the web again. It’s starting to feel like a good field to work in once more. But a colleague raised a good question What is Web 2.0? There’s no clear definition of what it is
. Of course, I tried to hand wave my way out of the corner – It’s social software…yadda yadda yadda…AJAX…yadda yadda yadda…gMail
. But I was bang to rights, the whole concept is nebulous whatever the Wikipedia entry says.
Well, I just found a link to a great site through a post on Techcrunch that clears the whole thing up. The brilliantly named Supr.c.ilio.us solves the problem in true Web 2.0 style by providing the social software for people to vote on what sites are or are not Web 2.0. More than a little tongue in cheek, but interesting nonetheless.
It works just like the Hot or Not site, where people submit photos of themselves for the public to rate as Hot or Not. It’s got some great metrics for the sites you submit, such as ‘Buzzword Compliance’, and you can tag the sites submitted. Looking at the tags on Supr.c.ilio.us, it would seem that Web 2.0 is mostly about:
- tagging
- bookmarks
- social
- blogging
- AJAX
And, of course:
- Web 2.0
Nothing like a circular argument to muddy the waters. So there it is: Web 2.0 defined not in a nutshell, but rather in a tag cloud. Quite appropriate, really.
