Web 2.0 History

A very interesting essay on the history and meaning of Web 2.0 by Paul Graham. You don’t always get to hear about how something got its namesake, and also get some insight regarding how this is not Bubble 2.0:

The reason this won’t turn into a second Bubble is that the IPO market is gone. Venture investors are driven by exit strategies. The reason they were funding all those laughable startups during the late 90s was that they hoped to sell them to gullible retail investors; they hoped to be laughing all the way to the bank. Now that route is closed. Now the default exit strategy is to get bought, and acquirers are less prone to irrational exuberance than IPO investors. The closest you’ll get to Bubble valuations is Rupert Murdoch paying $580 million for Myspace. That’s only off by a factor of 10 or so.

And I do like the quote below when talking about a key part of Web 2.0:

what “Ajax” means is “Javascript now works.”

But what makes Web 2.0 so interesting to me is the non-technical aspects:

Ajax, democracy, and not dissing users. What do they all have in common? … But there is a common thread. Web 2.0 means using the web the way it’s meant to be used. The “trends” we’re seeing now are simply the inherent nature of the web emerging from under the broken models that got imposed on it during the Bubble..

And of course Google fits into the mix:

Google was a pioneer in all three components of Web 2.0: their core business sounds crushingly hip when described in Web 2.0 terms, “Don’t maltreat users” is a subset of “Don’t be evil,” and of course Google set off the whole Ajax boom with Google Maps.

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