It seems that everyone has their own idea of what Web 2.0 means.That is one of the pitfalls to using a single buzzword to define everything you see on the internet. I have heard people describing nearly every new website as being Web 2.0 as if it was describing the launch date of a site. The term ironically is the most popular category on Resourceful Idiot. In leu of this, I am going to finally give you the definition of Web 2.0 and the principles that define it. In order to do that however, I need to start from the beginning with Web 1.0.

You can group each of the “Web x.x” as a different movement when it comes to internet usage. Web 1.0 is the movement that took place during the beginning of the internet.

Think AOL, Geocities, and Netscape.

Back then the primary use of the internet was taking print media and posting it online. Web 1.0 saw books, news, music and everything else being moved into a digital format. This movement is still going on and will probably never stop. This is because as new data becomes available it needs to be made available online, but the majority of the community has shifted focus toward data integration since there is not much innovation remaining in posting data online.

Now that brings us to Web 2.0. Many think that this is the current movement of the internet, and in some ways you are correct. After all this data was posted online with the Web 1.0 movement, the online community began to look for ways to share all of this data. The main question that drove this movement, “How can I take this data and share it with other people?” Since this question was asked, sites have popped up all over the internet trying to answer this question with different approaches. One of the most adopted solutions involves the idea of social networking.

Facebook is a popular Web 2.0 site utilizing social networking as a solution

All of these sites, like Facebook, use the concept of a social networking to create a community. Each community member is responsible for contributing information to the rest of the users. Even though social networking is the most popular approach, another prominent approach is the development and utilization of web services. I wrote an article a few weeks ago about different web services and their technologies (REST and SOAP), and I mentioned that the majority of sites you visit have a web service running in the background. These services allow you to integrate data between sites through API’s (Application Programming Interface) such as you see on Flickr and Amazon. RSS/Atom feeds are also products of the Web 2.0 movement. This movement is still very much alive and being actively addressed.

Now to look into the upcoming movements, Web 3.0. It is difficult to define what Web 3.0 will be as you cannot define something that has yet to occur on a large scale. The best way I can define what we will see with this movement is the integration of data on the internet. Now that the data is online thanks to Web 1.0 and sites can share data through API’s and social networks (Web 2.0), the next obvious direction is to do something with this massive amount of data we have available. A common way of describing this is the use of internet as a platform. With Web 3.0 applications we will see the data being integrated and applying it into innovative ways that were never possible before. Imagine taking things from Amazon, integrating it with data from Google and then building a site that would define your shopping experience based on a combination of Google Trends and New Products. This is just a random (possibly horrible) example of what Web 3.0 applications will harness. An illustration would be to draw nodes to represent all the sites on the internet and then draw a new node. Draw lines from all those existing nodes into the one you just created. The consumption and presentation of the data is what Web 3.0 will potentially be.

The definitions of Web x.x terms is highly debatable. Even when writing this, I was told that technology is what defines Web 2.0. The use of Javascript and AJAX is the “essence” of Web 2.0. However, these technologies have been around since Web 1.0 so obviously this is incorrect. The technologies that have been developed during these phases are simply there to help answer the question in a more accurate way. To prove my point let’s look at history. The guillotine did not define the Enlightenment movement back in the 1700s, the guillotine was developed in response to the questions the Enlightenment movement sought answers for (in this case, “Humane death”).