The Orange Chair

A comment I hear often every time I talk about Web 2.0 is: “Man, I hate that term”. I confess I didn’t like it much either when I first heard it a few years ago. Roo Reynolds had a nice short presentation posted inside IBM where he listed how 3 prominent IT personalities viewed the term Web 2.0. Here are some highlights:

Tim Bray, co-founder of Open Text and Director of Web Technologies at Sun, used to hate it:

I just wanted to say how much I’ve come to dislike this “Web 2.0” faux-meme.
It’s not only vacuous marketing hype, it can’t possibly be right.

Paul Graham, Lisp programmer, venture capitalist and essayist, was not a big fan of the term, but not as radical as Tim:

[The term "Web 2.0"] seemed that it was being used as a label for whatever happened to be new—that it didn’t predict anything.

Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media and the person who popularized the term, had a good point though:

There might be a better name (I tried “internet operating system” on for size starting back in 2000), but the fact that Web 2.0 has caught on says that it’s as good a term as any.

Once you go through the seven Web 2.0 principles delineated by O’Reilly in his seminal article “What Is Web 2.0″, it’s hard to keep arguing that the term means nothing. There’s certainly a logical thread - or “gravitational core”, to use his words - that tie together the sites and services that we typically refer as web-two-oh-y. What I typically find is that people dislike the “2.0″ part of the name or the fact that a really comprehensive description of it almost requires you to list the seven O’Reilly principles, like the so-called “compact definition” in his website:

Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an “architecture of participation,” and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.

Not very compact to me, especially if compared to the one that James Snell (another IBMer) uses for his developerWorks blog name:

chmod 777 web

This is not a problem exclusive to Web 2.0: concepts such as Semantic
Web, Ontology and Net Neutrality also require some elaboration and
getting used to. Alternate names like Social Web or Participatory Web are theoretically more precise, but not as catchy as Web 2.0.

The way I personally came to terms with using Web 2.0 to define the “thing” that happened with the Web in the last few years is: I stopped seeing “2.0″ as a number. To me, “2.0″ basically means anything using the architecture of participation that’s behind the Google search, Zoho web apps, Amazon’s reviews, Facebook’s platform, blogs, wikis, podcasts and all the other animals in the Web 2.0 zoo. That’s where the 2.0 offspring terms - Management 2.0, Identity 2.0, Banking 2.0, Governance 2.0, Mobile 2.0 - are feeding from.

You can always argue that DB2 is also a bad name, but nobody sees that “2″ as a sequential number anymore. No one asks “when is DB3 coming out?”, but I hear the question “what is Web 3.0 going to be about?” all the time. I don’t actually believe anything will be widely called Web 3.0 or 4.0.

Web 2.0 can be seen as the French Revolution of the web: you don’t have kings and queens telling you what is right and wrong anymore. Eventually, as most sites and web-based services capitulate from their ivory-tower, top-down approaches to a more collaborative and inclusive model, Web 2.0 will gradually be diluted and will lose its meaning and appeal, the same way it happened to e-Business.

A few years from now, we’ll see Web 2.0 more like a movement, similar to the wave of Atlantic Revolutions that started in the late 18th century and to the counter-culture and mini social revolution from the sixties. Minus the guillotines, the long hair and the VW vans, of course.

In “Why Facebook and MySpace Won’t Change the Marketplace,” Tom Davenport argues that although consumers are gaining power through the use of Internet-based social technologies, there doesn’t seem to be a corresponding trend towards empowering employees. He writes:

But are there analogous trends within companies? I don’t see them. Since employers pay employees, that gives them a certain power to start with. And while employees may trust other employees more than their senior management bosses, they are usually reluctant to say so publicly. Employees don’t even fully control the content in their own emails (with widespread email surveillance and those embarrassing brand signatures many employees are forced to use), much less the overall messages that their companies send out into the world. In general, I wouldn’t say the power held by employees has increased much in recent times, and with the decline of unions, the rise of the imperial CEO, etc., it would be easier to argue the opposite position.

It’s interesting to compare that with my experience with IBM. I’m new to the company, having officially started last October 15, but in a sense I’ve been there for almost two years because I did my master’s research with the IBM Toronto Center for Advanced Studies. Intranet blogs and bookmarks helped me connect with people around the world at different levels in the organization chart. So far, my experiences with IBM have made me feel that we do exercise trust and personal responsibility in intranet social computing, and that these tools help us build those relationships with people we might not have met without a serendipitous connection through social computing.

Is this universal? No, but I think it’s a good thing that social computing triggers us to ask questions about organizational culture and openness. There needs to be that fundamental trust that employees won’t misuse these virtual watercoolers, and an orientation towards collaboration that acknowledges contributions from all over the company. Will Facebook, MySpace, and other social computing tools change a workplace where control is everything? Probably not. Early adopters of these tools might be fired as fast as they are found. In an organization characterized by openness and trust, though, social computing can help people connect and do amazing things.

Intranet social computing tools aren’t about controlling the conversation, but about enriching it with information simply not available on the Internet. Intranet social computing also helps create a place where people who are new to social computing might feel safer about trying it out and talking about non-confidential matters. Random encounters in social computing often turn into productive collaborations because of shared organizational goals and resources.  Enterprise social computing goes far beyond just allowing employees to access consumer tools such as Facebook. How far? Let’s find out!

Via Enterprise 2.0 Evangelist’s del.icio.us bookmarks