How old is Web 2.0?

April 26, 2006 10:58 AM

How old is Web 2.0?
posted by airguitar to Computers & Internet (18 answers total)

link.
posted by kcm at 10:59 AM on April 26, 2006

When did del.icio.us start?
posted by rinkjustice at 11:00 AM on April 26, 2006

Define Web 2.0. The term itself is what, about two years old? Interactivity on the web is more than a decade old, but no one used this special marketing name back then.
posted by caddis at 11:08 AM on April 26, 2006

That term has no meaning, therefore Web 2.0 has no age.
posted by falconred at 11:40 AM on April 26, 2006

There is no Web 2.0. It's the marketroids at work.
posted by Malor at 11:43 AM on April 26, 2006

Whether or not the term has any meaning isn't the question -- you can certainly trace the first use of a word to an origin.

You can trace the term back to O'Reilly Media and talks Tim O'Reilly gave in mid-to-late 2004. O'Reilly threw the first Web 2.0 conference in October of that year, but I recall the title elicited a "huh?" from everyone that attended and was mostly ignored. It wasn't until summer of 2005 that the term started to get some legs, and it's been overused ever since.
posted by mathowie at 11:45 AM on April 26, 2006

Web 2.0 is a lot of different things and you can date almost all of them back to the earliest days of the web.

Amazon, I think, is probably the oldest web 2.0 application.

The usage of the term only goes back to late 2004, early 2005 I think.
posted by empath at 11:55 AM on April 26, 2006

First, define the terms -- some examples of definite Web 2.0 would be useful.

Or, what does Web 2.0 have that previous versions didn't?
posted by Rash at 12:01 PM on April 26, 2006

Ooop -- on preview, shoulda read kcm's link first.
posted by Rash at 12:03 PM on April 26, 2006

Del.icio.us (late 2003) and Google Maps (February 2005) were a couple of the big movers of the bunch of stuff people call Web 2.0, I think. Google Maps was an "Aha!" moment, where in the weeks after its release a whole bunch of people had discovered a bunch of technologies that had been sitting there all along but which hadn't seen much use. The whole "users share content" tags folksonomy thing sort of sunk in more slowly -- more of a "Hey, look what those people are doing" dawning than a "Look what you can do!" snap. (I remember how Flickr moved from Flash to AJAX a couple of months after Google Maps and got talked about a lot more once it did.)

For the part of "Web 2.0" which is AJAX, that word was invented here in February 2005.
posted by mendel at 12:04 PM on April 26, 2006

If by Web 2.0 you mean web sites that use AJAX, I'd say del.icio.us was the leader and gmail was when it really "arrived" (though AJAX has been around since 1998).
posted by winston at 12:21 PM on April 26, 2006

This article (and, especially, the accompanying PDF diagram) provides a detailed analysis of the roots of "Web 2.0" in the early days of the Web, as well as the more recent ideas that have caused people to see this as a new trend.
posted by jjg at 12:55 PM on April 26, 2006

Web 2.0 was released to the public on June 18, 2004. However, pre-released copies were leaked on various p2p services as early as March of that year.
posted by Hildago at 2:06 PM on April 26, 2006

I got my copy in the mail around mid-2004.
posted by dmd at 2:37 PM on April 26, 2006

Yeah, that sounds about right. I hope I saved the receipt, it should have a date on it.
posted by Hildago at 3:28 PM on April 26, 2006

Web 2.0 hasn't really started yet, it's still in freaking Beta.
posted by alana at 3:44 PM on April 26, 2006

Web 2.0 predates Web 1.0. I think it was actually release when Web 0.9 was in alpha testing.
posted by blue_beetle at 4:30 PM on April 26, 2006

It was over and dead the day they named it, and 37signals decided to turn the hype machine on.
posted by potch at 6:33 PM on April 26, 2006