What is “Web 2.0″? And What Comes Next? — An Answer for Businesses

I recently spoke with a friend who poked gentle fun at some companies who say they want to be, “Web 2.0 compliant.”

“As if it were a standard,” he chuckled.

The term “Web 2.0″ gets tossed around a lot. It’s even starting to become a business buzzword like ’synergy’ or ‘paradigm.’ But what does it really mean?

The Scoble writes:

Web 1.0 was about pages. URLs.
Web 2.0 was about users. Adding them onto corporate pages. Wikis. Blogs. Myspaces.
Web 3.0 is about getting rid of pages altogether. Being able to make the Web YOU want or need. Is Twitter a page? Or a post? Or an SMS? A graph? Or a map display?

I’d like to add a few things to that.

Web 1.0 was primarily about pages and URLs. It was also about sloppy HTML and flash entry pages. The focus was on look and experience in the browser rather than content.

Web 2.0 is about user participation. But it’s also about a shift in focus from wild colors animations and design to simple, clean code and well-organized, tagged, searchable content.

Web 3.0 — as Mr. Scoble calls it — is about discreet chunks of content presenting themselves in various ways. It’s about freeing up that content to be viewed on multiple devices and found in a variety of ways. It’s about developing a standard markup language for content that is easily understood by computers and by humans like microformats.

The future of content distribution means that your customers’ opinions about your products will not just show up when someone Googles your company name. They’ll also be geotagged to your storefront, so that when a potential customer walks by, he can see whether other people have good things to say about your company.

This means that even though services like Twitter aren’t particularly relevant to businesses now, they will be in the future as those discreet chunks of content are formatted, tagged, marked up, cross-referenced, and shared worldwide in real time with anyone who cares.