In a recent Podcast I heard in Marketing Voices Jennifer Jones interviews Guy Kawasaki on impact of social media on marketing. At the start of the interview Jennifer and Guy deliberate on the meaning of Social Media and without missing a beat Jennifer defined social media as “… its blogs, wikis, Pod Casts…its literally everything that is Web 3.0…its really communicating socially” . 

Huh?…wasn’t that how we defined web 2.0?. ..and why didn’t Guy stop her and ask if she made a mistake and meant 2.0. This got me thinking. Over the past year or so, after the initial hype and euphoria, everybody felt that web 2.0 was over used.

When it begun, it had almost the same sex appeal as “Je t’aime” (French for I love you)
but now after 2-3 good years of this ‘era’ being around, if you ask five industry professionals if they work in a web 2.0 company they will most likely try to disassociate themselves from this definition and try to find a more concrete one. “Web 2.0 …oh no, we are more of a Peer 2 Peer broadcast video network community” in any case the point is clear – Web 2.0 is cliché’ , its broad, its almost meaningless..

With all due respect to our contemporary Gurus and whom ever else is responsible for this, the name they chose could not have been worse. What does 2.0 means? That its after 1.0? …what was 1.0? how is 1.0 different then 2.0?

This is why its an oxymoron that people who were / are responsible for the 2.0 mistake are now trying to find a new, sexier, more advanced niche name and of all possible options are opting for Web 3.0 as the next buzz name.

Revolutions and wars should be named. Just recently we had a war in Israel and as strange as it may sound (needing a name to the war that is) NOT having one had an adverse effect on top of the natural adverse effects caused by wars - No name to put on memorial tomb stones, inability to refer to it in follow up legislative actions etc. And guess what the result was, they called it the “2nd Lebanon war - or war 2.0. The “Industrial Revolution”, The “Digitization Revolution” , The “ Communist Revolutions” etc. etc. – when you hear the name there is no debate on what the core change / focus was about. Referring to a revolution numerically (2.0) causes the existing “loose ball” confusion.

If the micro cosmos is the Internet, then its revolutions, rather then being referred to as numbers - Web 1.0, web 2.0 etc., should have been named after the core change they brought about - the public network revolution – that was the core benefit, being connected. The WWW is the name of the first revolution. From there the word witnessed the birth of HTML, hyperlinking and the birth of the first GUI browsers and online content and the de-facto accessibility to that content by the lame man. That is the Digital Content Revolution. A mass archive of billions of pages was created in a matter of a few short years and was accessible from anywhere.

However the content revolution was limited in its participation mainly to the enterprises of the technically savvy. Common people did not contribute to most of the web content. The old publishing powers who dominated offline continued to dominate online. Come the User Generated Content phase (also known, in parts, as web 2.0).

The democratization of web power, the massive shift of content generation from the established publishing powers to the individuals. In terms of the ‘history of humanity’ This is just important and the Print Revolution. This is the age where I, Gil Rosen, which represent no one but myself can write these very words and have them read by people in the US, Korea, Australia and Germany – where I know some of our readers come from (Hi ).

Parallel to this, another major shift we are witnessing is also revolutionizing business and social economics. The ability to deliver business applications over the web has decreased significantly the power of the large enterprises who controlled the OS and other core applications and the those who distributed software under mostly draconian terms.

Today, small business can access and use business application over a browser in a very effective pay per usage model with great. The “Empires” of Microsoft, Oracle etc. as we know them, no longer have hegemonic control over how our desktop look like. Small creative companies such as Zoho, 37 Signals and others can reach the masses with very little resources and no international presence.

Because the above two trends – User Generated Content and Software as a Service, have been sitting under web 2.0 - the name has been emptied of its meaning. It can be named “The User Generated Content As well AS the SaaS Revolution” but that would of course be ridiculous. Not less ridiculous is calling it Web 2.0.

Numbers mean nothing. And this is why we dislike web 2.0. because we don’t know what to associate it with.

So with all due respect to the gurus who bestowed 2.0 upon us (and I do really respect them) they made a grave mistake and I don’t see anyone saying anything when the term 3.0 is being thrown around. I would have loved to hear Guy stop the interview us soon as Jennifer mentioned the term web 3.0 and say…”hold on there” as a marketing guru at least I would expect him to say…this name is meaningless…its empty.

Twenty years from now our children will study and analyze what happened during web the 2.0, web 3.0…??!! I hope not. I studied about the Industrial Revolution, the War Of Independence, The Civil War and some others – regardless of whether they brought about wealth or carnage, at leas they had a proper name.