Web 2.0 expo
I was fortunate enough to be asked to speak at this year’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week. Whenever I have a conversation regarding web 2.0, I get two key questions: 1- What the heck is Web 2.0 and 2- How is Web 2.0 different then the Web 1.0 bubble. Speaking to an audience of Web 2.0 converts, I decided to speak on the second question because I truly believe that this time it is different, and for the better. Here

My best side!
The best part of this event was the opportunity to spend time with the other Keynote speakers, particularly Bezos and Schmidt. It is rare that we get time to simply hang out with each other, but the Expo had a great Green room, complete with a dartboard. Jeff ‘Jeffy Jeff’ Bezos cleaned me out after three straight games of cricket, but it was fun nonetheless.

Here are some of the points I covered in my speech at the expo:

Web 2.0 – What’s different:

The Creators are Users
The first dot-com boom was trailblazing. Everything was new: how people might use it, how others might make money off of it, and even how we access it. People experimented with all of these different variables, with an eager audience consuming the hype. Everyone knew this ‘World Wide Web’ was something special, but nobody knew where the path would lead. The trailblazing was led by smart people, but the web was new to them as well. The web was open to anything, and people experimented with new business models. To put it bluntly, nobody, including the consumers of the web, had a clue as to what was going to work on the web.

This time, sites and applications are being developed by people who grew up using the web. They know what should work on the web because they have spent countless hours and years exploring it. During Web 1.0, exposure to the web was a small slice of a business person’s life.

Web 2.0 involves a great deal of openness and sharing between participants, rather than the 1.0 world of content creation and distribution, 2.0 is founded on providing an interesting place for visitors to share. But this sharing isn’t the only difference between generations:

Showing monetary success is easier earlier
Prior to text ads, advertising was the exclusive domain of advertising agencies. These agencies would negotiate banner buys, create the banner and run it. There was (and still is) considerable cost in this process, so it was restricted to sites that generated enough traffic to be worth the effort. This meant that until you could show millions of pageviews a month, you were showing very little. Advertisers, and their agencies, simply didn’t have time to deal with thousands of smaller sites.

Google Adwords changed that. Now you can start a site, plug in Google advertising, and focus on building the site. Google takes care of the advertising. Sure they take a healthy cut, but start-up companies don’t need to staff up a costly ad sales department to see monetary returns.

Solutions are meant to be shared
In Web 1.0, people were building worlds to meet every possible need of the user. These sites fought for users and attempted to build massive closed worlds.

Web 2.0 is represented by companies who’s business plan is dependent on the success of other sites. Companies build widgets to plug into MySpace, or added to your own blog. Digg exists to highlight content on other sites. Web 1.0 was about trying to create destinations, 2.0 is about sharing.

We are building with better tools
Sites of yesteryear required developers to create everything, with little comparison sites out there. Today, developers have a strong tool chest to pull from and an army of developers to bounce ideas off of. From PHP to Ruby on Rails, tools are available to speed development. The open source phenomenon is great for group-building of platforms and solutions that creates new foundations for others to extend.


2.0 is a wonderful glimpse as to what the web is becoming. I can’t wait to look back on Web 2.0 from an even more exciting place in the future!