Most Internet startups these days claim to be the next Web 2.0 hit. Some startups, confident they’ve moved one step beyond the social web, define themselves as “Web 2.1” companies.

All of which begs the question: what the heck is Web 2.0? Non-Profit The Pew Internet Project tried to answer that question Thursday with the release of a report titled “Riding the Waves of Web 2.0: More than a buzzword, but still not easily defined.”

Coined by Dale Dougherty and made popular by O’Reilly Media in 2004, the term defined the wide umbrella of the blogs, wikis and social networking sites that made up the “participatory web.”

Coined by Dale Dougherty and made popular by O’Reilly Media in 2004, the term defined the wide umbrella of the blogs, wikis and social networking sites that made up the “participatory web.”

“That the term has enjoyed such a constant morphing of meaning and interpretation is, in many ways, the clearest sign of usefulness,” says the report, which argues there is “little consensus about where 1.0 ends and 2.0 begins.”

Web 2.0 vs. Web 1.0

The report looks at how online activity during the time known as Web 1.0 differed from that of Web 2.0, using data from market research group Hitwise to support its findings.

For example, the growth of the Kodak Easy Share gallery, an online photo-sharing site the report authors consider “traditional,” has flatlined. Meanwhile, “Web 2.0” site Photobucket made strong gains. Likewise, user-edited Wikipedia has gained ground, while Encarta is losing out.

Kodak

But the report points out that the most common Internet activity to date is still sending and reading email, even with the popularity of IM, text, and social network site messaging.

“Fully 53 percent of adult Internet users sent or read email on a typical day in December 2005—a figure virtually unchanged since 2000 when 52 percent of online adults emailed on a typical day. That’s more than instant messaging, blogging and online shopping combined,” states the report.

To close, the report compares Web 1.0 website community Geocities to Web 2.0 king MySpace. The Geocities model relied on “metaphors of place” while MySpace “anchors presence through metaphors of a person.”

For anyone following Internet trends as an active user or researcher, the report states the obvious. Web 2.0—the social web—is about people. That’s good news. Because now that we know what, exactly, this buzzword means, we can more easily look for signs of its demise.

Contact the writer:ADeMonte@RedHerring.com

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