by Tiara Rea

“Web 2.0” is either the greatest buzzword of the century or the worst, depending on what your definition is. And let’s be honest, how many people actually give it a proper definition? Lately, everyone and their brother have been throwing the term around like confetti on New Year’s Eve. The definition in Wikipedia (ehem, speaking of 2.0!) is the one most people refer to and the one I’ll choose to start, so let’s review it:

Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O’Reilly Media in 2004, refers to a perceived or proposed second generation of Web-based services—such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies—that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users.

What everyone agrees on is that Web 2.0 is about connection. And what says connection like social networking? Sites like Myspace, Friendster, and Facebook are prime examples of the burgeoning need to create communities that revolve around one simple thing – the user.

Let’s go back to 1998. I’m about 14 years old, I have glasses half the size of my head, a curly perm of hair down to my butt, I’ve just entered high school, and I’m angsty. “Mother,” I say, because I’m too snotty to just say ‘mom’, “We need a computer.” Now while many of you may have had computers back then without qualms, it was a bit of a to-do for my family, considering no one but me really cared one way or the other what WWW stood for. I was extremely conscious of the importance of this tool, because I saw the potential in communicating in a new form. I hated the phone, you can’t talk to a TV, and I was incredibly shy – the internet was perfect.

Whatever it was back then, we (or some people) refer to it as “Web 1.0”, the beginning of the World Wide Web. Back then I, like many others, connected to the internet via AOL, accessed chatrooms based on that browsing system, and found the concept of instant messaging to be phenomenal and almost mind-boggling. I was young, naïve, and I created flashy, ugly webpages just like everyone else. I knew how to insert pictures, highlight or bold text, and how to make an image look like water. I was ahead of my years. I could have been a “web designer” back then, because I knew 1) how to set up a free website, 2) how to manage that website, and 3) how to slap a background and some text on it.

But Web 2.0 suggests we are moving forward. This is the second generation of the Internet, and if I wanted to be a web designer now, I’d have to know CSS, PHP, HTML,

Ajax, and/or Ruby on Rails. Clearly, my puny little water-wave websites with flashing candles and pink text wouldn’t do the trick, and obviously no one would pay me to make a website. Unless you’re trying to win some kind of “ugliest website alive” contest, in which case my prices are quite reasonable.

In Web 1.0, I was just a user among users, and I had no control. Sure, I could create a website but that didn’t mean anyone would care, and if they did, how would I know? “Guestbooks” and email were the closest and only forms of communication between webmasters and their users, clients, and surfers. There was literally no connection – it was, as I saw it written somewhere, one brochure after another without correlation.

But now there’s Web 2.0, and that has changed everything. In this new generation, the internet is clean, classy, and only gets better with age. The more people use 2.0 products, the better they become and the smarter to boot.

Look at Wikipedia.org for example. A few years ago, I laughed at its creativity and now it is arguably one of the most important forms of information on the internet, not because its anything reputable or because it was written by someone with a PhD but because the masses have control. Or Myspace.com, which, five years ago, I couldn’t have cared less about but which I recently struggled to overcome a sever addiction to. Myspace’s success had nothing to do with marketing tactics or flashy design (it’s probably the ugliest website ever) – it was all controlled carefully by the best kind of advertisement – word-of-mouth.

Joe told Tim, who told Susie, who told Larry, who told Patricia, who told Jenn, who told me, and now I have 300 friends and Tom to thank for my withdrawals.

Now that 2.0 has made it to the cover of Time Magazine, I think people are really starting to let the backlash rip. They’re saying it’s a passing fad, that Web 2.0 is “merely” social marketing and hippie mentality. They say there really isn’t anything we can gain from this simple ‘trend’ and that it is just that, a trend. It will pass, and they can’t wait.

But will Web 2.0 really pass? If so, what was its purpose? If not, does that make it more credible?

The answer is yes, it will pass, mostly because everything passes but more because it’s a stepping stone to whatever Web 3.0 is. What excites me most is that nothing on the internet can last forever and the evolution is what drives a fad to become a lasting effect on the world. Web 2.0 has certainly influenced how business is done, how websites are run, and proves that there is still power in a single person who wants to make a change.

So even if Web 2.0 isn’t going to save the world, I think it’s getting us all a little closer to what the Internet should be — a space that belongs to us, where we control our content and our message, and above all, where we can make a difference.