Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide

Foreword

In 2004, when O’Reilly Media, John Battelle, and CMP announced the Web 2.0 Conference (later renamed the Web 2.0 Summit), we had no idea that we’d be naming the next big thing in the computer industry. The original premise of the Web 2.0 name was much simpler than that. In 2001, after the dot-com bust, everyone had written off the Web. But at O’Reilly, we believed deeply that the Web was here to stay, and that it was indeed the next platform. We also noted that all of the companies that had survived the dot-com bust—and all of the exciting new startups that were gaining remarkable traction—had something in common: they understood and exploited the opportunities of the network as a platform, rather than trying to graft old business models onto that platform. We saw Web 2.0 not as a new version of the Web, but rather, as the realization of the Web’s potential, its second coming, so to speak. We launched a conference to tell that story, and to reignite excitement in the industry about the transformative power of this technology.

The term Web 2.0 caught everyone’s imagination, coming at just the right time to capitalize on the rise of Google, mashups, and Ajax. But to us, the term meant far more than just advertising-based business models or new types of web applications. In 2005, I wrote a paper, What Is Web 2.0?, to formalize our ideas about this new platform. I argued that Web 2.0 is ultimately about harnessing network effects and the collective intelligence of users to build ...