Michael Arrington on "Web 2.0 is Dead!"

Arrington has declared that Web 2.0 is dead, based on the flapdoodle surrounding CMP's cease-and-desist letter and the hue-and-cry that spring up around that.

Personally, I completely disagree, on two levels:

1. The fact that mavens like Arrington decide that the term Web 2.0 has lost any utiliity it may once have had just won't percolate out to the larger world. Too many people have been introduced to the term for it to wink out. And it especially won't go away out because of the CMP cease-and-desist mess, no matter how much buzz that got in the blogosphere: it's really a very small story about a very small niche in the the tech community.
2. Much more importantly, the term is useful. Web 2.0 apps are motivated by different principles than the previous generation of Web apps. Making the distinction is helpful, as I wrote a few months ago, when Mike was arguing in favor of the term (see Traitors in our Midst), reproduced at length below.

[from Traitors in Our Midst: Web 2.0 Antihype ]

[...] there is a new sensibility about web applications -- how they are conceived, designed, built, marketed and sold -- that in aggregate is truly different that what preceded it. Note that Dave [Winer] at least concedes that the technologies being "hyped" are honest, which means that maybe the technologists are too? Maybe it's just those evil marketing guys again.

This antihype is directed, implicitly, against the advocacy for Web 2.0 by people like, well, me, as well as more well-known figure like John Battelle (I wrote about his recent op-ed piece in the New York Times, Building A Better Boom), and Tim O'Reilly (see Web 2.0: Compact Definition).

I am not prepared to pen a magisterial debunking of the Web 2.0 antihype that is growing, but I am committed to chip away at it, day by day. Here's a few observations as to why Web 2.0 is real:

• Web 1.0, and its bubble, have come and gone. Many of the innovators in Web 2.0 are young folks who either observed the Bubble from afar or as newly minted hirelings in Web 1.0 companies. Their aspirations and thinking have been strongly influenced by the debacle. As I recently wrote, about the frugality of Web 2.0 companies, a real shift from Bubble excesses:
  • I was just on a tour, talking with a handful of Web 2.0 tech start-up founders, and the tendency is to stay small, almost humorously small. At Mary Hodder's Bloqx [now Dabble], for example, three developers were crammed into a room no larger than a large closet. Jason Fried of 37 Signals advocates keeping teams small, not just from a desire to reduce the burn, but to increase the likelihood of less features creeping into products. This week, I saw the same reflected in the jampacked three-room office of Podcast.com, where Scott Beatty, the CEO, described the company's plans to the 'rolling beta' model of developing more and more rich services, which rely on small, agile development coupled with an obsession with end-user experience.
  • It's an austere and highly philosophical era -- which John only tangentially touches on -- but one that is likely to lead to very different outcomes that Web 1.0. I believe that it's also a generational thing. These are either young veterans of the Web 1.0 mess, or those that witnessed the fall out of "irrational exuberance" from afar. And they are at least going to make new mistakes, if mistakes are to be made.
• While by no means universal, and by no means a standard, there are general principles that reappear over and over again in discussions with Web 2.0 application developers. I recently referred to these as "central tendencies":
  • Users First -- The user experience is a proxy for the user, and all of the folks I touched base with so far agree that user experience is the pivot point of everything. That means that the norms of human expectations, social interaction, and interface goals become the central motif of these apps. For example, sharing with others becomes a basic principle, not something tacked on later.
  • Build from personal need -- In every case, these visionaries have decided to build something because they wanted to exist for their own personal use.
  • Build small, fast, and iteratively -- The nature of Web 2.0 app frameworks, and why they have evolved, is to support a extremely agile development mantra. But across the board, I have seen very small teams building the core functionality of some potentially larger product, and rolling it out to real users to see how it works. And then respond to feedback, and roll out the next version. This is not just a technique for the initial development stage of these products: its here forever.
  • Build small, focused apps, that could serve as building blocks in larger assemblages -- All these folks are resisting the tempation to bloat apps with more and more features, opting instead to build small, highly focused apps that could be integrated (though APIs) into larger assemblages (mash-ups).

• As the world speeds up, the gap between any action and it's inevitable reaction seems to have closed, almost to nothingness. Ideas that have promise, technologies with the power to change the world, products that offer productivity boost, almost anything new -- and therefore threatening -- attracts nay-sayers just as quickly as adherents. The antihype almost arrives before the promise of the innovation can even be experienced by the early adopters. The Spanish have a saying, "May no new thing arise," that suggests the comfort that comes from resisting innovation, or the promise of change. Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions observed that those in established roles in a scientific community will resist new paradigms that emerge -- even if they better explain dispartities in observed reality -- because it threatens the cultural and social foundations of the community, and the established scientists' roles within it.

So, in this case, I guess I am a conservative, and I will happily continue to use the term, no matter what others may say. And I will quote Arrington, who wrote last year:

Look at Flickr. Look at Delicious. Look at Riya. And 1,000 more. My God, how dare you tell me that something amazing and new, completely new, hasn’t happened on the web. Web 2.0 isn’t about wikipedia definitions and neatly wrapped bundles of functionality that non-innovators can use to understand what’s going on. It’s about the web coming out of a nuclear winter and bursting forth in a fit of chaotic growth. It’s about hope and love and getting ridiculously wealthy by ignoring the wisdom of those around you who say “your idea, it sucks”.

Don’t be so eager to tear down this castle in the sky. It may not be so easy to build it yet again.

:-)

So I don't think Mike should tear down that castle in the sky, either.

tags: michael+arrington, web+2.0+is+dead, web+2.0, tim+oreilly, cmp+cease+and+desist, dave+winer, web+2.0+antihype

Comments

[alan herrell - the head lemur]

Web 2.0 is dead.
Web 1.0 was used as a signpost by pundits and by disgruntled investors who got their bank accounts sucked dry.
Web 2.0 is another attempt to drink from the same well.

the Web is evolving, and cannot be convienently have arbitrary lines drawn across it, stating that 'this' was the seminal event that moved us from 1-2-3 etc. Not for lack of trying by the next pundit with a unique selling proposition.

Blogging is being pushed around as one of these seminal events, but even here, it has it's roots in the 'guestbooks' folks used to have on their sites in the 90's.

That big a number change will happen when we all have chips in our brains and our keyboards are rotting in landfills.

[ELS]

The fact that mavens like Arrington decide that the term Web 2.0 has lost any utiliity it may once have had just won't percolate out to the larger world. Too many people have been introduced to the term for it to wink out.

I think you're vastly overestimating the awareness of the term in the general population.

Just speculating here, but I would imagine if you polled the general population, even the awareness of the term "Web2.0" would be less than 1%, and the number of people who could actually give a cogent description of what the term means would be smaller still.

[Adrian Chan]

I especially agree with your point on user experience, Stowe. Web 2 has us thinking about social interactions and communication online in a way that focuses us on social practices over user practices, and dynamics of interaction over individual user needs and goals.
As the medium continues to mix communication with information publishing, online transactions and interactions open up. The medium now sustains an open state of conversation in all manner of applications, sites, modalities...
We dont think any more of the user's immediate needs and goals, and their satisfaction by visits to web sites to search and buy online. We think about the ongoing conversations and interests, subscriptions, memberships, participation, etc they get involved in as the web's content becomes a dynamic culture of its own. Folksonomies, recommendation engines, rankings and all of that just being the first examples of what the medium can accomplish...

[Stowe Boyd]

Alan - Web 2.0 is one of those broadstroke characterizations of a shift in culture, like Post Modernism, or Grunge. Such terms don't have clear boundaries, and like tags they over generalize for the sake of capturing something essential. It's a human characteristic to name trends and shifts in popular thinking, even if it is logically flawed when analyzed at the highest magnification.

ELS - This is actually a corallary to my argument. Out of the tiny number of those who are aware of the term, an even smaller fraction is aware of the contention here in technoland about the term.

Adrian - Beautifully said, bro. Write a blog and trackback, and you'd have mined some clickthroughs on that one.