Fast Company recently posted the top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Web 2.0 . The simplified list is this:

10) Kayak
9) Yelp
8 ) Myspace
7) Ning
6) FriendFeed
5) Meebo
4) Twitter
3) Digg
2) Facebook
1) Google

Fast Company gives sound reasoning behind each selection and this blog is not going to debate the merits of these companies and their status in the top 10. But it got me thinking, what really is Web 2.0?

Let me back up for a second. I’ve been to many conferences, listened to many webinars and currently read several blog posts on Web 2.0. So as an “advanced” user I get what people are selling as Web 2.0. Its – making your site “more fancy” and more interactive and more getting your customer involved and using social media for marketing. Right?

But there’s more to it than that. The link above to Tim O’Reilly’s website is a great point of reference for a new or intermediate analyst or marketer who is just finding out about this “Web 2.0” business. The most amazing thing about what is said in Mr. O’Reilly’s document is that was written in 2005 and most of the concepts were developed in 2003 and 2004.
This guy literally wrote the book on how to build a Web 2.0 site. Now look through the below map/chart and compare what’s written to the above ten sites. I would say that all ten of these sites fit into what was written back in 2003-2005.

(Taken from: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html#mememap )

Further, O’Reilly breaks down Web 1.0 as what Netscape was and Web 2.0 what Google is (please read the text below the Meme Map in the linked article for a more robust description of this). So I guess it’s not surprising that Google is the #1 Innovative Web 2.0 company.

My favorite part of O’Reilly’s text is on page two section 2 where he talks about collective intelligence. As a web analyst, the most important piece of what he says Web 2.0 is… is the ability to collect and using the user information to inform your website.  Our book, User Driven Change, gives you four scenarios where you can apply user information to make improvements to your website, and as well collect post-change information to make sure that the changes you made are indeed improvements. While our book probably does not have the 3-5 year futuresense that Mr. O’Reilly had, several of our readers have said that there are lots of great nuggets of information in there and some moment of pure genius.  So check it out!

So now that we know what Web 2.0 is, where do we go from here?  Some marketers and analysts would say that “Web 2.0” as a term is now dead.  This actualy spurred my thoughts on “what is Web 2.0″. While many say that it started with the web sites that survived the Dotcom bubble bust, others say it is the sites that sprung forth from these sites and / or any new sites that popped up after the bubble bust. I think this strays to a point I could make about whether the marketers or the designers control what is Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and beyond, but I will leave that for another discussion.

I do think that Web 2.0 is not dead or dying at least not in the design sense… mutating possibly; transforming – always. This is actually part of the definition of Web 2.0 according to O’Reilly. So will we ever get to Web 3.0 or beyond? Only if we get more Mr. O’Reilly’s to envision what’s next.

I do envision what Web 3.0 could look like, but I won’t reveal my secrets just yet.  You have to ponder though, if Google is Web 2.0 will they survive into 3.0, or will they go the way of Netscape (RIP)?
1 http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
2 http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/14/the-death-of-web-20/