Annoying 2.0

Last week I attended an RFID conference where the keynote speaker suggested that we had entered into a new era, the era of RFID 2.0.

You know, of course, where this comes from: Web 2.0, which has been with us since 2004, ever since the Web 1.0 folks got jobs again. Fortunately, Wired published a "Geekipedia" this week with 149 entries, including one which attempts to describe exactly what Web 2.0 is:

The famous judicial assessment of pornography applies equally to Web 2.0: It's tough to define, but people know it when they see it. Textbook examples include global group hugs like MySpace and Friendster, file-sharing forums like Flickr and the Pirate Bay, and every one of the Net's 90 million blogs. But a precise definition is elusive.

Sometimes Web 2.0 points to a set of technologies that lets sites share and manipulate each other's content, chiefly XML's flexible tagging scheme and the RSS automated-syndication standard. For instance, Hype Machine automatically assembles a virtual radio station out of MP3 files it scours from obscure music blogs, making it, in effect, a specialized user interface for thousands of disparate pages. But Web 2.0 can also mean sites and services that turn community into content, from pledge-night vomit pics on Facebook to the public-access reference entries on Wikipedia. The most convincing examples fuse these two strands, combining metadata and social networking. Take del.icio.us, which lets users tag and share Web bookmarks.

What these sites have in common is a tendency to treat the Web less like a TV channel or magazine, which convey information, and more like an operating system or computer, which generate it. Except that this computer gets its processing power from the humans plugged into it.

One of my more jaded friends describes the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 as the difference between spending $10M building something silly that nobody wants, and spending $500K building something silly that nobody wants. It does seem somewhat evident that one of the goals of at least some significant part of Web 2.0 players is to build a business from their kitchen table while never getting out of their bathrobes and slippers.

Then, to my regret, I opened my Business Week this evening and saw the title Election 2008: It's the Economy Stupid 2.0.

So, you're going to have to get used to it for a while, I'm afraid. I spotted edu 2.0: the future of education on the web. I also found Giving 2.0, Lunch 2.0 and Women 2.0 (which I did NOT click on, now that I realize my browsing history is memorialized in a secret vault in the Rocky Mountains).

That's just the beginning. Though there is hope, because "Geekpedia" also suggests a Web 3.0:

As surely as day follows night and every few years brings a more bloated version of Microsoft Office, the buzz surrounding Web 2.0 was bound to touch off chatter about Web 3.0. The pundits have shown remarkable restraint; they didn't up the version number until 2006, fully two years after tech-conference impresario Tim O'Reilly debuted the original phrase. Perhaps that's because there's even less consensus around what Web 3.0 might mean. Is it an artificially intelligent network? Does it have a 3-D user interface? Only an army of hungry PR reps will tell.

Now I'm off to do some Work 2.0, see if Wife 1.0 wants a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie (hoping to stay Husband 1.0), and make sure that Kids 3.0 are doing their homework.

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations

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