There have been a number of milestones these past few years in what we're calling Web 2.0. For the most part, they have been small incremental developments that have led to massive paradigm shifts (I've been using the phrase "paradigm shift" since before it was a buzzword, so leave me alone about it!) in the way we think about the web, and connecting, and cooperation, and all that good stuff. I can't even begin to cover what they all are, because it's been distributed throughout the industry, and realized in completely different orders by different people as ideas and practices have diffused outwards. It's been a huge learning curve that all of us have (and still are) experiencing differently. And so I can only discuss the developments that have caused shifts in my own personal thinking.
For me, it started with Livejournal. My first blog was a livejournal, and that is where I first experienced the power of the social network divorced from geography. When the dot-com crash happened, and all the hype turned into anti-hype, I was immersed in a community of friends nationwide engaged in all sorts of discussions that confirmed the idealism we all had about the web. Far from dying, I intuitively knew that some powerful ideas I couldn't yet articulate had survived the dotcom crash, and so I started paying attention. In 2003, while volunteering/hanging out with the Singularity Institute for AI, I encountered my first wiki. At the time, wiki's were still hacked together bits of code that lacked polish. But their potential for collaboration was obvious to me.
I started noticing all these RSS symbols everywhere. The concept was kinda cool, but their potential unrealized until Bloglines came out with their web based RSS reader.
Then somwhere in there, Friendster showed up, as well as Orkut. Google's Orkut had closed membership, so we all felt special when someone invited us to join the network.
Google Maps sent the idea of Mashups into high gear.
Gmail seemed to institutionalize the private beta cycle.
I took my first look at del.icio.us and had no clue what it was so ignored it for four months until December of '04 when I finally figured it out. The understanding and the practices that came from del.icio.us changed my life. I think it also changed the industry by creating the initial Web 2.0 echo chamber that led to the rapid adoption of AJAX, among many many other ideas.
At the same time I was learning all these things about what the web is -supposed- to look like, and how connected humans will be interacting with each other in the 21st century, thousands of other people were learning many related lessons in parallel. In October 2005, Tim O'reilly brought it all back together in this document that really clarified and drew lines between so many of the lessons we were learning. I think that was another milestone.
Around the middle of 2006, I noticed that I had stopped learning anything. There was nothing new, and money had already well begun to enter the equation again. For me, it seems that we had entered a time period where the incremental breakthroughs had stopped, and all the ideas and technology we had learned into existence were diffusing outwards from the Web 2.0 echo chamber.
Which brings us to the past few months. There's a new milestone, and it comes in the form of Facebook! By opening up their user data via their platform, social networking has become a utility that services can be built on. The idea of a service opening up in this way has yet again changed the landscape on the web, and I finally see movement beginning to move towards what I have long considered the holy grail of Web 2.0: a completely distributed and manageable identity system where ones social network exists as a cloud between any and all web applications with social functionality.
Brad Fitzpatrick, the man responsible for Livejournal (where it all began for me) and OpenID, is at it again by starting conversation on what he's calling the "social graph problem". This conversation has started a few times in the past, but the pieces to move it forward haven't really been in place until now, and it looks like Brad is trying to bring a number of the big players to the table to solve the problem of disconnected networks.
I'm super excited, because this is the direction I think the people part of Web 2.0 has been moving all along!
