There is no difference between web 1.0 and 2.0

This week, on LinkedIn, the business social networking site there was a flurry of user generated content (UGC) created around a question of one Tillmann Neben.

He asked?

By what will “Web 2.0″ be remembered 20 years from today? (now that it’s over…)

The first generation of internet apps (or Web 1.0) is basically remembered by its publisher to reader model, letting the webmaster (does this word still exist?) produce content, and the website visitor was reading that stuff. Also online shops were big and kind of the killing feature of the internet. I can still remember the buzz about “imagine, you can buy it anywhere, for the best price, over the web, it’s called web store”.

Web 2.0 brought the idea of user generated content. Well known sites here: youtube, digg, blogs, wikis, linkedin …
People came up with the content.

So what’s up next?

Many that answered spoke of Tim Berners Lee’s idea of a smarter semantic web.

I have to admit that it surprises me that many people still can’t see what’s becoming more and more obvious.

There is no difference in its essence between web 1.0 and web 2.0, only what was successful in 1.0 is even more so now as the web matures.

The killer apps of web 1.0 measured in both reach (how many people used them) and frequency (how often they were used) was at their core social as well.

• It was email (user generated content);
• Instant messaging (the same);
• People selling stuff to each other (Ebay)
• And search.

Oh I hear you say, search is surely not UGC or social?

Oh yes it is.

In 1994 Jerry Yang launched Jerry’s guide to the World Wide Web, a human made directory of the few websites out there (there was only about 100,000 websites at the time).

This guide became Yahoo! but the directory itself failed. It could not keep up and keep track of all the websites. By the time Google launched in 1998 there were close on 10 million websites already, the vast majority of them amateur sites or pages on Geocities, Tripod etc. Today there is one website for every 30 people on the planet.

Without a search engine that delivered relevant results this medium would have looked a lot like other forms of media, and would have discouraged ordinary people and favoured companies with deep pockets.

But Google introduced PageRank, a social technology if ever there was one.

Google explains it simply:

‘PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.’

The result of this is profound. It has made the web a meritocracy.

This meritocratic system is the foundation of social media. Anybody can create a web page and can link (vote) to what they like.

It fundamentally changed the way we found stuff on the web. It ensured that the most compelling, most useful web content always floated to the top of search rankings.

It’s great for ambitious creative and skillful individuals with something to do or to say. You will be found even if you have no brand or big marketing budget. Provided you are good.

In short the web – at its core – has always been about people. Who would have thought that the convergence of the huge telecoms, media and computing industries will have people at its heart?

This people focus of the web is what Forrester Research has called ‘the groundswell’ – a set of media technologies that enable people to get things from each other that they used to get from big institutions.

In Web 2.0 this social character of the web has been even more profound and obvious than earlier, and it will be even more so in Web 3.0.

Yes there might be semantic technologies transforming the web even further and making it smarter, but web 3.0’s advances will still revolve – at it’s essence – around empowering people.