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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The other day I was perusing former colleague Pete Kim’s master list of social media marketing examples and noticed that the Detroit Pistons was listed as a Twitter user. Naturally, as a Pistons fan, I had to find out what was up, so I clicked in and what did I find? Why an “official” Twitter feed pushing box scores, game highlights, promotions and other run of the mill fare. I kept poking through and ran into this tweet:

Hmmm . . . Well either one of two things is happening here. Either the Piston’s marketing department has gone off the deep end — remember this is the team who’s most far reaching recent national news was the Malice at the Palace — or Warren Skukernek, the guy who added it to the list, got taken for a ride. Considering a search of the Pistons site for “twitter” returns no results I have to believe this is less than official.

That said, it begs the question, with this much trash out there why would any actual brand even bother? Other than because you read the Comcast Cares case study and set up your own, of course.

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This weekend rumors began circling that Microsoft is about to rebrand Live Search as “Kumo.com.” Apparently Kumo translates to either “spider” or “cloud” in Japanese. All things considered it sounds like a pretty logical choice, if not a terribly awkward word, and yet another expensive branding exercise. I can’t quite imagine anyone saying “I don’t know, lets Kumo it.”

Just this past week I was meeting with Jeff Schick, the head of social software at IBM, and coincidentally we started talking branding — Bluehouse was the big hit of the analyst conference, by the way. Apparently when IBM was naming Lotus Connections they hired a branding consultancy to help with the decision. The big winner from the consultancy: SCOVE. Yes, you read that correctly, SCOVE. I don’t know if it was an acronym or an actual word, I didn’t have the chance to ask since Jeff and I were laughing too hard. Needless to say that particular branding firm did not make their commission, and Jeff’s team came up with the name Connections themselves. Now when one of Jeff’s team members is trying to pass off a crap idea they are accused of “Scoving.”

Frankly I’m not sure I could have recommended clients take a look at IBM SCOVE with a straight face, though I didn’t think Wii or Hulu would roll off the tongue quite so smooth either. Maybe “Kumo it” will catch on, but I would put my money on “dude, you totally got Kumo’d” entering the lexicon instead.

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