Tim Bray and a cast of thousands are debating whether the term Web 2.0 is a useful term to describe today’s Web. He cites Tim O’Reilly’s argument that “The content is getting bigger and richer and deeper, user interfaces are getting better, and interesting new applications are showing up. His premise, basically, is that we need a name for this renaissance, and “Web 2.0 is as good as any, and it seems to be getting traction, so where’s the harm?” Nonetheless Tim Bray thinks it’s a “faux-meme” – that we’re really up to 3.0 or even 8.0. I too think it’s a bogus idea, but in the other direction. We’re still running Web 1.x.
First, it isn’t a renaissance – to have a re-birth, you must first have a birth and a loss, and this web stuff is simply too continuous and too short term (even in dot-com years). Second, we haven’t done anything to justify the leap from 1.0 to 2.0 yet. In particular, all interesting 2.0 transitions in history have involved a painful dislocation as people realize, “oh shit, we didn’t get it quite right, and we can’t achieve backward compatibility.” It’s going metric, it’s like changing from steam to diesel, or AM to FM. What might such a dislocation look like in the web? It’s hard to know until we actually run into the wall, but something like TBL‘s nirvana of semantic mark-up might do it: we can imagine that, fairly quickly, a large amount of web content would become second class, which would be painful. (There’s a related idea about evolving the web from a resource for people to a resource for autonomous agents, but I’m not quite sure how to describe that, and whether that would be 3.0.)
When I hear people complaining about the next web transition, I’ll think about changing from 1.x to 2.0. Not before.
