One of the buzzwords in the web development world is “Web 2.0″; a rather nebulous term coined in 2004 used to describe the “second generation” of websites.

The first generation of websites (retrospectively dubbed “Web 1.0″) were based on the idea of a fairly static website being seen by many visitors- not much different to an online version of an existing shop, magazine, newspaper etc., but existing in “cyberspace”, and without the overheads that go along with the “traditional” businesses.

Exactly what “Web 2.0″ means varies depending on who you talk to. To some, it’s about a particular visual design style; rounded corners, pastel shades, soft reflections and so on. To others, it’s about interactive sites; social networking, user generated content, and a platform for the sharing of information. To others still, it’s about the implementation of technologies such as AJAX, breaking pages down into smaller independent units for more efficient transfer of information, and allowing parts of a page to change and update without refreshing the entire page. The one thing that can usually be agreed is that it represents the second generation of websites, and it’s principally a marketing concept, rather than a genuine “new version” of the web.

Whenever any new media has appeared in the past, it has tended to start out being used in the same way as an existing media- the first printing press was used to print lots of copies of bibles quickly, which were previously copied out by hand. Radio broadcasts started out by reading out books before they moved on to broadcasting current news events. TV started out with people reading the same stories to a camera that were already coming over the radio before they moved on to going out and actually showing people what was happening in the world, rather than just telling them.

The pattern is that each time, the new media has appeared, people have learnt how to use it, then it has developed. The Gutenberg Press was originally used to print lots of copies of bibles, which previously were all hand-written. The wide availability of printed texts that the Gutenberg press brought to the world then led to increased literacy levels, meaning that after some time (as a potential audience developed), the press could be used to distribute new books, or to spread new ideas (such as the spread of protestant works in Catholic Europe.) Stories became something that people could read privately, rather than have read out to them, and there was a shift from an oral to a written tradition of storytelling.

From Gutenberg’s invention, it took over two hundred years before it became possible for an author to write a book, print many of copies of it and then sell the book to make a profit. In comparison, from the announcement of the World Wide Web project to “Web 2.0″ took just 14 years.

However, the majority of the concepts that make up “Web 2.0″ have been around since the original proposal of the World Wide Web. The interesting thing about “Web 2.0″ is that it isn’t so much a revolution, as simply a greater realisation of what the web was originally intended to be; a way for information to be freely exchanged over the internet. It seems to be a significant step in the web establishing itself as a new media.

I don’t think it’s so much a mark of something new as it is an acknowledgement that so many of the companies that tried and failed to succeed during the dotcom boom were falling so short of what could be done with the web. Rather than trying to make a screen version of paper products (books, newsletters, brochures etc.), website designers and developers are now recognising that the web is a new medium, and treating it as such; making the most of the huge potential audience, the interactive nature of a web page.

So what comes next? Well, it’s possible that Web 3.0 will come to have meaning in terms of something like the next-generation of distributed computing, where computers share the workload over a network. As PCs get faster and more powerful, they actually use the power for less and less time- meaning more and more unused capacity- via the web (and with much more bandwidth than is currently widely available), they could be networked to share and process information over a global network. Perhaps it will represent the web moving away from the PC and integrating seamlessly with other networked platforms, such as mobile devices or televisions. Maybe it will mark the day when your fridge works like a hotel minibar, notifying Tesco when you’re out of butter. But as Web 2.0 is simply a revision of the idea behind the idea of the World Wide Web, it hasn’t set the web on a path with any clear “next step” to take.

Not yet, anyway.