Well, dead may be a bit of an overstatement, but it is clear that the phrase “Web 2.0″ is dying.

This week my new report “Inquiry Insights: Web 2.0 And Social Media Technologies, Q1 2009” hit the Forrester Website. Throughout a given year, Forrester fields thousands of inquiries from clients and non-clients alike . Analyzing the nature and frequency of these inquiries — while not yielding statistically significant conclusions — provides a fascinating window into the minds of IT professionals, marketers, and technology vendors concerned with specific topics and often shows major trends in technology interest throughout the technologies’ life cycle.

So what have we seen for the Web 2.0/Social media market? Though the arguments about what to call the market — consisting of blogs, wikis, social networks, RSS, widgets, etc. — have mostly faded away, what people call the market is no more settled than it was 3 or 4 years ago. The big shift: a move away from “Web 2.0″ and a move towards “social media” or even more frustratingly towards “social networking” as a overarching category (not pictured below).

The change has been occurring slowly over the last year or so, with the phrase Web 2.0 hitting its peak among Forrester’s clients in Q2 2008, and falling off from there. From my point of view Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle’s effort to evolve the phrase into “Web Squared” is effort well spent; Web 2.0 had been getting stale and had lost its cachet.

One final note for the Enterprise 2.0 enthusiasts out there, that phrase has clearly not caught on with Forrester’s clients yet at all. Partly this is due to the fact that — for reasons I don’t want to get into  — Forrester resisted using the phrase for the last couple of years, and partly because Forrester clients interested in Enterprise 2.0 topics also use the phrase social media. It makes life mighty confusing for our inquiry team whose job it is to route the questions to the right analysts.

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I’m loath to use this blog to just complain about things that annoy me, but this is one that REALLY annoys me. For some reason in the last couple of weeks the Wall Street Journal has taken to publishing a new RSS entry every time an article is updated. This has been bearable so far, but this morning I was faced with at least 20 different entries pointing to the same Yahoo!/Microsoft search deal (see below). I have yet to unsubscribe completely, but am thinking very hard about it.

For marketers there is a clear lesson: RSS, and social media in general, have a very low switching cost for users. A simple click and I’m gone. If you spam users, get too “salesy”, or get too far off topic users can easily move on to something else. The reward of an engaged audience can be high, but the risk of alienating them, or tripping over your own feet is high as well. Experiment, but be careful.

For The Wall Street Journal, please, for the love of God, fix your RSS feeds!

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