Or there will be, but it wont be called Web 3.0.

And it wont be on the web.

Marc Andreessen wrote in his blog last week that “there’s no such thing as Web 2.0“.

Marc is a brilliant guy and I’m loving his new blog, but I regret to say that he’s off target here, as are the readers who try to define it for him in the comments below his post.

I should note that when the term Web 2.0 first gained use, I loathed it as much as anyone, and ridiculed it openly. I, like Marc, felt it was a marketing term slapped on a loose collection of technologies in order to package and sell some websites. And the term may have gained popularity for just that purpose.

But somewhere along the line, the term came to mean something legitimate and important. The term Web 2.0 is kind of like Justin Timberlake - it was originally ridiculous, maybe a sham, but it somehow managed to grow into something that, like it or not, you had to acknowledge, maybe even respect.

Marc notes that “many people have pointed out that there is no clear definition of Web 2.0″, and the visitor comments on his post reinforce this. One commenter states that Web 2.0 is about “rich client-side applications, tagging & ratings & voting, user participation & user-generated content, APIs, RSS, and web services, mashups & remixing content”. All attempts to define Web 2.0 seem to fall along these lines, and while they are not inaccurate, they also are not definitions but merely descriptions. Maybe that’s why some people think Web 2.0 doesn’t really exist - everyone is hung up on the description, nobody is bothering with a definition.

So here’s a short, easy definition for what Web 2.0 is: it’s web as ecosystem.

Web “1.0″, the web that Andreessen helped create, was a web where each site operated pretty much independently of all the others. Ebay, Amazon, Yahoo, plus the numerous forgettable startups I helped to code as someone just getting his start in the Internet - all of these operated more or less in isolation from each other. Sure there were hyperlinks going between the sites, and pop-up ads, but the content, and the value, stayed where it was created.

This was a natural place to start for the web - the only place it could start.

Web 2.0 arose organically out of this environment, a byproduct of countless entrepreneurs and inventors looking for ways to add value to their own services and to penetrate further into the marketplace with their own voice, or service, or product. They developed all of the technologies we associate with the term Web 2.0, operating individually for personal gain. But taken collectively, all of these technologies led to a different web, one where individual sites were no longer partitioned from one another but densely interconnected. Where content was created everywhere and flowed every which way - bottom-up, top-down, this way, that way, via XML and RSS. Where everyone had a widget on everyone else’s site, sharing resources and sharing eyeballs. It became a web of blurry boundaries and value chains.

To be successful in the original web meant to become a portal, where people set their browsers to open up on your site’s home page. To be successful in Web 2.0 means to dig yourself and your site so deeply into other people’s sites that they couldn’t imagine the web, or life, without you. That’s why Fred Wilson loves widgets so much - he understands they’re the key to success in the Web 2.0 ecosystem. The more value you provide on other companies’ sites, the greater your value in the web ecosystem, and the more likely it is you’ll be sticking around.

Saying that Web 2.0 is “APIs and mashups” is like saying the forest is “dirt and trees” - it’s technically true, but it misses the larger point because the definition is too granular.

On the other hand, saying that Web 2.0 is “just the web”, as Andreessen states, is also technically true - it is, after all, the same web. But it’s a bit like saying modernism was just a continuation of civilization. Here the definition is not quite granular enough. You can look at it that way, but if you do you’re glossing over a lot of important information.

Marc is right when he says that there’s no point in startups defining themselves as Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is the environment we are living and operating in in 2007 - it’s all-encompassing. To define your company as a “Web 2.0 company” is as useful as calling your company in the 1850s an “Industrial Revolution company”. Everyone is by definition Web 2.0, so there’s no competitive advantage to stating that fact. In that sense, Web 2.0 as marketing term is worthless.

More importantly, though, any startup that doesn’t absolutely understand what Web 2.0 really is, and have a detailed plan for how their company is going to fit into that, and what their value is going to be in the ecosystem, is totally hopeless.

And for that reason, it’s important to know that Web 2.0 is real, and to have a good understanding of what it is.

I was at someone’s house yesterday and was explaining outside.in to her. She said “oh the Internet is getting so good now. It used to be so lame when it first came around. It was like it made all of these promises that it couldn’t keep, and now it’s starting to keep them.”

I agree. Not the part about the Internet in the nineties being lame necessarily, but that the Internet of today is getting astoundingly good. I feel like I’m watching the golden age of the Internet happen right before my eyes. Not just watching it but participating in it.

I’ve read the word Facebook one too many times this week. Body reacting to it. Have to go drink beer in the park now. Perfect antidote.

On the plane ride back from Where 2.0 last week I read an article in Harvard Business Review called How Successful Leaders Think. I’m always wary of articles with titles like that - they seem like the business set’s equivalent to “10 ways to lose weight now”. But this article made an interesting point, one that resonated with my work experience, past and present:

Brilliant leaders excel at integrative thinking. They can hold two opposing ideas in their minds at once. Then, rather than settling for choice A or B, they forge an innovative “third way” that contains elements of both but improves on each.

I would change this quote from “Brilliant leaders excel at integrative thinking” to “Brilliant people excel at integrative thinking”, but otherwise I think it is right on. Everyone that I’ve ever enjoyed working with favors this kind of integrative thinking over the more traditional “option A versus option B” thinking. And right now, at outside.in, everyone involved in deciding on the direction of the site thinks this way. Every conversation is an exercise in finding that “third way”. And at the end of the day, you can’t really point to who came up with what idea - they all build on one another, integrate parts of each other, discarding parts that don’t work.

It’s the thesis/antithesis/synthesis model of idea generation. It makes coming to work really fun.

Matthew Nestel interviewed me a year and a half ago about my project Grafedia. The magazine he was writing it for decided not to run the story, and the last I heard from Matthew was “Okay no worries - I’ll just find another magazine to run it.” It totally fell off my radar, and then a few weeks ago I got an email from him out of the blue - he had made good on his promise and found a magazine to run the piece. And it turns out that it’s a great article! One of the more interesting ones I’ve seen about Grafedia. Here it is:

CYBER MEMES AND GRAFEDIA SCHEMES

The future of cities will be more and more about service, less and less about manufacturing. As practices of reuse and reintegration advance, the demand for actually manufacturing things will decline, while the demand for re-adapting and redeploying things will increase.

Things that we think of today as being entirely about manufacturing will become increasingly about service. All of the products we consume today will potentially become items that can be adapted and reused in some way.

It’s like the shift on the web from custom-made, unique web sites and applications to centrally-made content management systems that don’t require construction but do require customization, maintenance and oversight. Like the move from Dreamweaver - everyone has to build everything from scratch - to Drupal - no one has to build anything, as it’s already built for you and ready to be repurposed however you want.

For a couple of years I’ve been saying that whenever I go to the corner store in my neighborhood. Last night I was standing in line and heard the woman in front of me say it. I glanced up and saw that she had five or six good-sized items on the counter. I was impressed.

Maybe my neighborhood is going bagless from the bottom up.

I’ve been looking at the thread on Digg about the “she invented/he invented” discovery on Google.

There are currently 354 comments on the topic. About two thirds of the way down the page a long-ish comment appears. It’s one of the first comments that is more than a few sentences, and I think it’s one of the better-written ones on the page. However, it is immediately followed up by this reprimand:

Rather than a long tirade, like above. How about:

www.inventions.org/culture/female/index.html

It occurred to me that when people argue on the web, increasingly they argue in hyperlinks and skip the actual writing. And why not? It’s faster and more elegant to post a link than to write 300 words into a discussion form. The discussion’s participants are like DJs - instead of writing their own stuff, they just play other people’s stuff, and in the end nobody notices the difference. The argument gets had, people make their points, everyone goes away satisfied, the same as if people had actually made points themselves.

I saw this picture today on BBC’s website, in a story about how all of the toxic computer junk waste ends up in places like Nigeria, where it pollutes the environment and endangers kids. When I first glanced at it, I thought this kid was an engineer-in-training working on hardware assembly. He looks so intent on what he’s doing, and his grip on the screwdriver seems so professional and delicate, like he’s working with chopsticks.

But then I realized he was just stripping an old computer for components.

I wonder how this kid sees himself or what he’d see in this picture.