A 'Most Likely to Succeed' List from the Web 2.0 Hypefest

Tim O'Reilly, who gets credit for coining "Web 2.0," has taken several whacks at defining it, and he took another one this week at his own Web 2.0 Expo this week in San Francisco: "We are talking about persistent computing in which we are becoming part of a great machine." Thanks, but if that's it, I'll pass. If you, gentle reader, on the other hand, want to plug into whatever Web 2.0 means, a ratings company called Hitwise used the conference as the launch platform for its own little bundle of hype, a list of six products and companies that it thinks will rise to the top of the Web 2.0 heap. See if you agree.Hitwise is a click-counter that measures traffic to more than 800,000 Internet sites. Based on its numbers, it announced this week six Web 2.0 companies most likely to reach the soaring success of YouTube, Wikipedia or Flickr. (Are you already getting the idea that Web 2.0 may have as much with market valuations as innovative technology?)

These products are supposedly what O'Reilly has in mind when he says of Web 2.0, "Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them."

The people, Hitwise concluded, are most likely to be early adopters, so it looked at the sites users it defined as early adopters are already visiting. These six, it predicts, are sites that the rest of us will soon be using, too:

If you're thinking some of this doesn't sound exactly blindingly novel, you're not alone. No less than Tim Berners-Lee, who invented Web 1.0, the real World Wide Web, was asked last fall to agree with the distinction that Web 1.0 is about connecting computers, while Web 2.0 is about connecting people. He didn't see it that way: "Totally not. Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along. And in fact, you know, this 'Web 2.0,' it means using the standards which have been produced by all these people working on Web 1.0."