Jeffry Houser sent me an e-mail this weekend and asked me to define exactly what Web 2.0 is. I’ve spent a lot of time over the past week talking about Web 2.0, and it’s a fair question to define exactly what it is I’m so excited about. It’s also a very difficult question.

There seems to be a swelling backlash against “Web 2.0″ and I’m not really sure why. Joel Spolsky says

The term Web 2.0 particularly bugs me. It’s not a real concept. It has no meaning. It’s a big, vague, nebulous cloud of pure architectural nothingness. When people use the term Web 2.0, I always feel a little bit stupider for the rest of the day.

That’s a pretty resounding incitement from someone is well respected in the community. A look at this article over at The Register shows more examples of a big distaste for Web 2.0. I think all of this stems from an inability to really define what Web 2.0 is. Well let me do what I came here to do and define it for you: Web 2.0 is what the internet will be in 3-5 years.

Maybe that’s a bit of a trite definition, but in my mind, that’s the point and it’s why Web 2.0 is so exciting; we’re all still defining it. Tim O’Reilly has what seems to be the major definition, but every one of us is defining it every day when we contribute to the internet. I realize that’s kind of taking the easy way out, so let me draw from O’Reilly’s definition what I think are the most important aspects of Web 2.0.

To me, Web 2.0 is all about data, which really is what the web has always been about but there are a couple of important distinctions. What makes Web 2.0 different is that the data should be largely user created. Blogs, tags, reviews, comments, and wikis should all be huge components of Web 2.0. This makes the data more “human” which makes it more relevant to users and makes it easier to find what we’re looking for. Along those same lines, the data needs to be open. Developers should be able to use meaningful data in their own applications and extend others applications to continue driving the growth of the web.

The other big part of Web 2.0 is the idea of the web as a platform, and this is where RIAs come in. By leveraging the web as a platform, you can take advantage of the amazing ubiquity of it. Every OS can access the web, nearly every mobile device, even video game systems and TVs have some web capability. As developers, we now have the ability to reach an audience like never before. Imagine programming a great user experience that will work seamlessly and be accessible on a computer, a cell phone, and in a car. The web provides that possibility.

Not every Web 2.0 “application” is going to be an RIA, but if the data is presented in an accessible format, there isn’t any reason why Web 2.0 won’t be filled with RIAs that are providing extensive data with a fantastic user experience. I say again, I don’t necessarily think that Web 2.0 is synonymous with RIAs, but if you look at the principles of Web 2.0 that Tim O’Reilly espouses, RIAs are well positioned to provide the “face” of Web 2.0.

I realize this has been long winded, and I didn’t even really give you a definition of what Web 2.0 is, but I hope that you’re a little bit more excited about helping me define Web 2.0 and a little bit less cynical about using the term.

I don’t really own that many CDs and the bulk of my music collection is a random assortment of songs downloaded over the years. It isn’t a bunch of nice, well-organized, ripped albums. As a result, my MP3s are incorrectly named, horribly tagged, and just generally a mess. This wasn’t a problem until I bought an MP3 player, and now I have trouble finding songs I want to listen to.

Luckily, the guys over at MusicBrainz have solved my problem. They created software that will go through your music library and compare the audio footprint to tracks within their database. Then they’ll set the ID3 tags and names of the files. So far, I’ve tagged and renamed 2199 songs and I have 795 left to tag. It’s all driven by the community, so the more people that index their music, the more efficient the auto-tagging will be. Translation: Sign up so that schmucks like me can leech off of your well organized music.

Ciara and I really need to move back to the city. Today we went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art craft fair, which was a lot of fun. I’m not usually into the craft fair thing, but this one was really intense and there was some amazing stuff there.

Afterwards though, Ciara took me to a tea bar that just opened up on Sansom Street. It’s called Remedy Tea Bar [Philadelphia Weekly Review], they have a great tea selection, spacious seating area, and wireless. If you live near there, you should definitely check it out. If we still lived in the city, I’d spend way too much time there.

We also checked out a new tea store at Sansom and 18th called The Premium Steap (their spelling, not mine). It’s more of a tea reseller as opposed to a tea bar, but it was good. It’s no House of Tea however.

With tea as the new thing all over Rittenhouse, maybe I’m way cooler than I thought I was.

I just read Jesse Warden’s post about Web 2.0, and since a) I think that Jesse is a great developer, and b) my blog was mentioned, I felt the need to come clean: I am 23 years old and have never really had life without the web. I use it for everything. I’ve never bought a plane ticket without the web, I’ve purchased maybe 12 CDs in my entire life (but downloaded many, many MP3s. I had Tubthumping as an MP3 when it came out), I have a MySpace profile, a LinkedIn profile, a facebook account and I hardly ever go to a restaurant without using citysearch.com first. Perhaps it’s just because I’ve grown up with the web, but the idea of the web as a platform simply comes naturally to me.

I could be totally off base when I talk about the death of the desktop, and I imagine that even Kevin Lynch and Co would look at my Web 2.0 posts with some amount of bemusement and curiosity. I think the power of the web is collaboration. Being able to tag photos with Flickr, provide reviews for products on Amazon.com or for restaurants on Cityseach, and blogging about anything, has given the “unwashed masses” an opportunity like never before. I think that’s the real power of Web 2.0; the community is what drives the content.

As we get further and further down this path, it just seems to me like the desktop as a platform becomes a bit obsolete. We play our games online, we share/store pictures online, we get our music online and we make our thoughts heard online.

There are still some major security hurdles to overcome before the web “replaces” the desktop, but I think the day will eventually come. Think of the value of a computer which isn’t connected to the internet and you’ll start to understand why the PC is simply a lower tier solution to find the content you’re looking for. As our connections get faster, the world gets more and more connected, and the security solutions become more robust, I just don’t see a reason why all software won’t be delivered over the web someday.

That day may be a long way off, but in my short 23 years, I’ve watched the web go from a curiosity to a major source of information in a time span that amounts to half of my life. And now with technologies like Flex and AJAX, we are able to provide solutions over the web which behave just like regular desktop applications. To quote Irving Berlin, it just seems like anything that desktop apps can do, web apps can do better because they add the aspect of collaboration and they do so with mostly open APIs and standards without the lock in that a developer creating applications for an OS has.

I really like reading the Flash and Flex community post about Web 2.0 because we’re the ones who will be creating the solutions to drive the future of the web. I hope you guys keep talking about the pros and cons because it’s always an informative read and I think it adds a lot to the discourse of what Web 2.0 is.

Related Entry: Why Web 2.0 Moved Microsoft and Not Macromedia

I’m in San Francisco on business, so I’m a little slow on this, but Scott Barnes posted about AJAX, Microsoft, Macromedia and Religion yesterday and discussed the ?left-wing conspiracy theory? on how Macromedia is going to take Microsoft head on with their flash player. Because I talk a lot about Macromedia and Microsoft in this space, and becuase I enjoyed the post a lot, I want to respond and expand.

First of all, I don?t think this has ever been about Macromedia taking Microsoft head on. What has happened is that the internet has changed and now Microsoft realizes that their business model isn?t going to work any longer. They can?t rely on their monopoly over the desktop because the desktop is becoming more and more obsolete. It isn?t going to go away in the near future, but it?s going to become much less important and it is not going to be the platform for software deployment in the future ? the web is. These are the fundamentals of Web 2.0.

That leads to the question of who is in the best position, from a business standpoint, to take advantage of this change in how we build and use software. I?ve argued before that Macromedia is in the best position, and I think that?s why there is a sudden serge of Microsoft vs. Macromedia. It?s because for really the first time their business models are on a collision course. In fact I would say that it was Microsoft who moved into the path of Macromedia simply because Macromedia has been better positioned for the future throughout their history.

It really isn?t about what Microsoft, Macromedia, Oracle, Google, Sun and Electronic Arts do with their chosen market ? the point is that Web 2.0 is the market, and these companies are all competing for the first time. Who ever would have thought that Google would be challenging Microsoft in the Office space, or that Electronic Arts would be working with Microsoft to deliver a complete online experience to gamers? The idea of Web 2.0 has fundamentally changed the software industry and now companies are scrambling to alter their strategies accordingly.

Microsoft has had to make the biggest change and Macromedia has had to change very little. Macromedia provides a great platform for delivering the next generation of internet applications and the next generation of software applications. It?s going to be an exciting few years as these companies all come up with different ways to create the future and I think we as developers will be able to choose from some great technologies along the way.

The web has come a long way, and it?s safe to say that undressing Laura Croft is only the beginning.