Lets drill down for a moment into each of these three cases, teasing out some of the essential elements of difference.

For example, at the first Web 2.0 conference, in October 2004, John Battelle and I listed a preliminary set of principles in our opening talk. The first of those principles was The web as platform. Yet that was also a rallying cry of Web 1.0 darling Netscape, which went down in flames after a heated battle with Microsoft. Whats more, two of our initial Web 1.0 exemplars, DoubleClick and Akamai, were both pioneers in treating the web as a platform. People dont often think of it as web services, but in ct, ad serving was the first widely deployed web service, and the first widely deployed mashup (to use another term that has gained currency of late). Every banner ad is served as a seamless cooperation between two websites, delivering aWhat Is Web 20n integrated page to a reader on yet another computer. Akamai also treats the network as the platform, and at a deeper level of the stack, building a transparent caching and content delivery network that eases bandwidth congestion.

Google, by contrast, began its life as a native web application, never sold or packaged, but delivered as a service, with customers paying, directly or indirectly, for the use of that service. None of the trappings of the old software industry are present. No scheduled software releases, just continuous improvement. No licensing or sale, just usage. No porting to different platforms so that customers can run the software on their own equipment, just a massively scalable collection of commodity PCs running open source operating systems plus homegrown applications and utilities that no one outside the company ever gets to see.

In the year and a half since, the term Web 2.0 has clearly taken hold, with more than 9.5 million citations in Google. But theres still a huge amount of disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means, with some people decrying it as a meaningless marketing buzzword, and others accepting it as the new conventional wisdom.

Googles service is not a server--though it is delivered by a massive collection of internet servers--nor a browser--though it is experienced by the user within the browser. Nor does its flagship search service even host the content that it enables users to find. Much like a phone call, which happens not just on the phones at either end of the call, but on the network in between, Google happens in the space between browser and search engine and destination content server, as an enabler or middleman between the user and his or her online experience.

In the end, both web browsers and web servers turned out to be commodities, and value moved up the stack to services delivered over the web platform.

Nonetheless, these pioneers provided useful contrasts because later entrants have taken their solution to the same problem even further, understaWebnding something deeper about the nature of the new platform. Both DoubleClick and Akamai were Web 2.0 pioneers, yet we can also see how its possible to realize more of the possibilities by embracing additional Web 2.0 design patterns.

Netscape framed the web as platform in terms of the old software paradigm: their flagship product was the web browser, a desktop application, and their strategy was to use their dominance in the browser market to establish a market for high-priced server products. Control over standards for displaying content and applications in the browser would, in theory, give Netscape the kind of market power enjoyed by Microsoft in the PC market. Much like the horseless carriage framed the automobile as an extension of the miliar, Netscape promoted a webtop to replace the desktop,new york asian escort model and planned to populate that webtop with information updates and applets pushed to the webtop by information providers who would purchase Netscape servers.

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The bursting of the dot-com bubble in the ll of 2001 marked a turning point for the web. Many people concluded that the web was overhyped, when in ct bubbles and consequent shakeouts appear to be a common feature of all technological revolutions. Shakeouts typically mark the point at which an ascendant technology is ready to take its place at center stage. The pretenders are given the bums rush, the real success stories show their strength, and there begins to be an understanding of what separates one from the other.

At bottom, Google requires a competency that Netscape never needed: database management. Google isnt just a collection of software tools, its a specialized database. Without the data, the tools are useless; without the software, the data is unmanageable. Software licensing and control over APIs--the lever of power in the previous era--is irrelevant because the software never need be distributed but only performed, and also because without the ability to collect and manage the data, the software is of little use. In ct, the value of the software is proportional to the scale and dynamism of the data it helps to manage.

Oct. 2009: Tim OReilly and John Battelle answer the question of Whats next for Web 2.0? in Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On.

Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesnt have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core. You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core.

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The concept of Web 2.0 began with a conference brainstorming session between OReilly and MediaLive International. Dale Dougherty, web pioneer and OReilly VP, noted that r from having crashed, the web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity. Whats more, the companies that had survived the collapse seemed to have some things in common. Could it be that the dot-com collapse marked some kind of turning point for the web, such that a call to action such as Web 2.0 might make sense? We agreed that it did, and so the Web 2.0 Conference was born.

While both Netscape and Google could be described as software companies, its clear that Netscape belonged to the same software world as Lotus, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and other companies that got their start in the 1980s software revolution, while Googles fellows are other internet applications like eBay, Amazon, Napster, Web and yes, DoubleClick and Akamai.

This article is an attempt to clarify just what we mean by Web 2.0.

In our initial brainstorming, we formulated our sense of Web 2.0 by example:

If Netscape was the standard bearer for Web 1.0, Google is most certainly the standard bearer for Web 2.0, if only because their respective IPOs were defining events for each era. So lets start with a comparison of these two companies and their positioning.

Figure 1 shows a meme map of Web 2.0 that was developed at a brainstorming session during FOO Camp, a conference at OReilly Media. Its very much a work in progress, but shows the many ideas that radiate out from the Web 2.0 core.

--syndicationThe list went on and on. But what was it that made us identify one application or approach as Web 1.0 and another as Web 2.0? (The question is particularly urgent because the Web 2.0 meme has become so widespread that companies are now pasting it on as a marketing buzzword, with no real understanding of just what it means. The question is particularly difficult because many of those buzzword-addicted startups are definitely not Web 2.0, while some of the applications we identified as Web 2.0, like Napster and BitTorrent, are not even properly web applications!) We began trying to tease out the principles that are demonstrated in one way or another by the success stories of web 1.0 and by the most interesting of the new applications.