Overkill 2.0

Everyone (okay, almost everyone) on the internet has heard by now of Web 2.0. In fact, everyone has probably been trying to embrace some or all of the ideas of Web 2.0 (or at least, their interpretation of it), to improve usability and user interaction, to make their website or product more attractive to work with, or, well, just because it's cool.

And this meme has spread to other endeavours, like Enterprise 2.0, Grid 2.0, and a host of others, culminating in things like hindsight 2.0 and lunch 2.0.

All of this looks like a clear case of Marketing 2.0 (not to be confused with Marketing 2.0), with the danger of becoming the next bubble.

The question is what we are talking about. The initial "Web 2.0" idea has mushroomed into a whole cluster of related ideas, and the 2.0 meme has spread through to a number of (often quite loosely) connected areas of interest. And, of course, picked up by people with more sense of marketing than of technology (in and of itself not necessarily a bad thing.. if you're a marketeer).

In the end, this whole "versioning of concepts" thing is going fade away. It can be compared to how attaching ".com" to your company name made it magically worth more back in the 1990s, though the current trend is closer to a meme, and less of a hype than ".com" ever was.

Links:
Berners-Lee calls for Web 2.0 calm
Tim Berners-Lee on Web 2.0: "nobody even knows what it means"
Scrap Web 2.0, yes, but embrace Knowledge 2.0 surely
Web 2.0, Web 3.0 and Beyond: Villainous Version Numbers