The new buzzword 'Web 2.0' has been gaining momentum and is becoming slapped onto every new website that rears its head. I don't think there's any doubt that as a useful term, it's quickly losing any meaning. In fact, it's a bit of a misnomer to begin with. Things are being positioned as if they are some kind of new and revolutionary development, when a better way to describe these developments would be 'mature'. As a 'platform', the web has finally reached a level of maturity and stability that actually makes it a viable platform for application development. Up until this point, it was a mish-mash of ideas, standards, and technologies that really hadn't been defined either by an organization or its users.

Technology is socially constructed - and this applies to the web moreso than many other technologies. The whole mythology of the web was that it was a distributed, open, and free space that allowed for open publishing and a vast exchange of ideas and interaction between people. However, just what people wanted to publish and how they wanted to do it was yet to be defined. The idea that it could be thrown up overnight and be a fully realized environment was naive. It takes time to develop a stable platform of this magnitude, and for the idea to penetrate the public consciousness - because it's the users that make the platform viable.

All of the core ideas that are being flagged as 'Web 2.0' have been there from the start, they're just now at a point that they're mature enough to actually deliver on some of the promises that they made. Take a few examples:

1. Personal publishing. Free publishing systems (Blogger,WordPress,etc.), free web hosting, and popular acceptance have brought blogging to the fore. Truth be told though, people have been putting their ideas onto web pages from the very beginning - the idea has just become interesting to a wider audience, and works better now.

2. Application platform. Developers have been jury-rigging 'applications' on the web since the beginning as well. It's only recently though that there's been enough bandwidth, expertise, and stability amongst platforms to make truly rich applications possible. AJAX apps could have been done 10 years ago, but browsers were too flaky, and bandwidth was too thin. Imagine Google Maps on your 14.4k modem.

3. Social Networking/Participation. This has everything to do with technology penetration. Up until this point, there just weren't enough people engaged in the web culture to make it a viable platform for any of these things. It took time for people to understand the technology, to get interested and excited about it, for broadband to become widespread, and for the kids to whom this stuff is second nature to grow up a bit.

And of course, there's the 'perpetual beta'. An apt way to close this little blurb, as I think that it accurately describes what the web as a whole has been undergoing for the past decade or so. The entire experiment has been evolving and improving and being refined as developers gain experience with the technologies and users become familiar with the ideas and culture. 'Web 2.0' is being used to describe the new emerging web "after the bust", but the bust is just what happens when you launch with pre-release software that's buggy as hell. It fails! In 1997, it was more like Web 0.5Alpha. So, rather than calling it 'Web 2.0', maybe we should be calling it Web 1.0, since it may just deliver on all the promises it made originally.

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