Web 2.0 Is Dead — As A Common Phrase Anyway

July 31st 2009 Posted to Branding, Enterprise 2.0, Social media, Web 2.0

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).

Web 2.0 InquiriesThe 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.

View Comments

  • Hey Gil, thanks for the comment. I think the data are pretty useful, though I would love to get similar data from Gartner, Burton, etc. to compare. But the keywords were pulled from the full inquiry text, so when the client fires off an email the whole thing is what we looked at; it was not impacted by our inquiry team. I agree that our own research will impact the inquiry load (hence both our frustration at the "Enterprise 2.0" problem) but all in all I think it is a worthwhile barometer on mainstream terms.

    As for your easy zing, that hurts! If you have any recommendations for getting editing to move faster I'd love hear them.
  • Yes indeed, I thought it ironic that Forrester and Forrester's clients did not align well on this terminology -- and yet Forrester is recognized for its thought leadership here. This problem had significant implications to me, as I learned late in the game how work gets distributed there. Your CEO and some of your colleagues now use the term "social" as the catch phrase. But that seems to add more confusion between the issues of consumer behavior, marketing to consumers, and business collaboration. We are challenged by language here. "Web 3.0" just adds more confusion to the conversation -- so that's not good here either. Are we so fashion conscious that we cannot use words that are a few years old?

    I think the problem is that "Web 2.0" is the wrong term from the start. Putting a number (2.0) instead of a description makes describing the evolution of the web much harder to scale. I would rather have seen "contributory Web", "participatory Web", "social Web" "real-time Web", etc to describe some of the minor shifts over the past few years -- no one uses 2.1, 2.2, or 2.3 either.

    But looking at your data for a moment, I'd ask if its fair to wonder if other factors are be at play that result in a reduction of these keyword-tagged inquiry. This data is easily swayed by the terms that the inquiry team uses to enter the inquiry requests you get, or by recent report titles (and blog posts). It could also be a result of a shift in client focus, or loss of interest on the topic with respect to the population that interacts with you. Wouldn't it be neat to compare other analyst's companies trends too? (e.g. Burton, Gilbane, Gartner...) Whereas I agree that Web 2.0 is becoming a dated term, this data chart my not be the right chart to prove it. Google searches might be more telling.

    <easy zing=""> Oh, and report about Q1 inquiry data -- out this this week! What kind of backlog are you running? It's summertime, man. </easy>
blog comments powered by Disqus