The Web 1.0 Elements That Refused To Die

In 2003, O’Reilly Publishing came up with the term ‘Web 2.0′. A couple of years later, Tim O’Reilly wrote a great article titled ‘What Is Web 2.0?‘ in which he shared this graphic from their original brainstorms:

Few would disagree with the right-hand column (other than perhaps ‘napster’) & there are some seriously accurate predictions in there. But amongst the left-hand column – the Web 1.0 elements that were supposed to fade – there are a few items that are still going as strong (if not stronger) than they were back then.
I’ve highlighted them above & here they are (in no particular order) including a couple of nice ironic twists:

Google AdSense to supersede DoubleClick

Though the FTC probe will last a while yet, Google’s famous $3.1bn acquisition of DoubleClick means it’s likely that the two will live happily side-by-side for a good while. It’s possible the two may merge at some point.

Blogs to supersede Personal Websites

When blogs do creep ahead of peoples homepages, this often causes difficulties. The reason being personal websites often have a defined purpose. (Incidentally I don’t think the homepage is dead, it just has a different purpose, while its former purpose has been spread around the site). Rather than killing off websites, many people are merging their blog into their existing website, or adding extra ‘landing page’ elements to their blogs to gain the benefits of each.

Cost Per Click to supersede Page Views

This is an interesting one. Even those hailing its death give the page view a couple of years yet. CPC did seem likely to triumph for a while, but AdSense (which is also in the ‘web 2.0′ column up there) now offers CPM (cost per thousand impressions – which usually means page views), and the death of CPC itself has been heralded in favour of CPA (cost per action). It’s safe to say CPC & page views will coexist for a good while yet.

SEO to supersede Domain Naming

Again, domaining took a hit for a while, but never really went away & is back making huge money again. The top SEOs who were supposedly going to overtake domaining are more likely to move into the market themselves (or help spread the message) than they are likely to destroy it.

Wikis to supersede Content Management Systems

Aside from the argument that wikis are systems for managing content, this one just hasn’t come true. Every corporate site out there still has a CMS. The popularity of wordpress and its ‘page’ functions now means that many personal websites are also totally CMS-managed. Alongside blogger, typepad, etc, a large percentage of the web is now content managed through (what were originally just) blogging tools.

Summary

A few years on from the creation of the list of 28 predictions, 5 ‘questionables’ isn’t a bad miss rate at all. It would be interesting to see Tim’s predictions for the next 5 years & even more interesting to see what actually will happen.

Technorati Tags: web 2.0, adsense, doubleclick, blogging, seo, domain names