Tim O’Reilly coined — or at least popularized — the term “Web 2.0.” At Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco I had the chance to sit down with him 1:1 for NTV Swiss, and ask what the phrase was actually meant to mean.
His answer was less about Ajax widgets and more about a third era of computing: after mainframes and the PC, we were building an internet operating system — global-scale, database-backed applications that get better the more people use them.
“Web 2 applications are built in such a way that they get better the more people use them.”
He pointed to Google PageRank (every link as a vote), real-time ad quality shaped by clicks, and Amazon’s early EC2/S3 as examples of the same idea at different layers: harvest meaning from participation, and treat the web as live software — not a package you ship every few years.
Not a version number
O’Reilly was frank that “Web 2.0” was a poor name. It suggests a version bump, when it was really about the second coming of the web after the dot-com bust — coined with Dale Dougherty around 2003 to remind people the web was still alive. He preferred Microsoft’s word “Live”: Britannica vs Wikipedia, frozen software vs systems that stop working if you stop updating them.
He compared it to IBM’s PC deal with Microsoft: incumbents can change the rules without realizing it. Software licensing was giving way to advertising, subscriptions, and “by the drink” computing — with Facebook, Google, Amazon, eBay and Yahoo already proving the economic engine.
Beyond “Web 3.0”
Asked about Web 3.0 / the semantic web / Second Life–style 3D, he doubted the label would stick. The next shift he foresaw was ambient computing: mobile devices and sensors feeding data into internet applications (geotagged photos, Photosynth-style reconstruction, phones listening for ads), plus the breakdown of closed carrier models. Companies that looked “not Web 2” — like Jaiku on mobile — might matter more than the ones with the right buzzword.
Advice for companies still catching up
“Find the young people in your organization who are already doing this and get out of the way.”
Same pattern as PCs entering corporations against IT resistance. And the strategic point he kept returning to: this is a data revolution. Control comes from the data you own and manage — assets many traditional firms (carriers especially) already had but weren’t exploiting.
Looking back from today, a lot of what he sketched — live services, participation loops, mobile sensors, ambient data — reads less like 2007 hype and more like the operating system of the web we actually got.