Web 2.0 should be so much more.

Yeah. Second post promised about a month ago. Okay so this post is maybe two years after everyone stopped trying to figure out what's going on here and the models have even reached the point of complete mockability. But I'm still thinking about these things, primarily because I'm reasonably convinced that everyone's got the answer wrong. Web 2.0 by and large refers to a class of Ajaxy (completely irrelevent), community driven (tangentially relevent - but epinions is still Web 1.0) and tagged content (and this is the real story). I'm pretty happy to start with Web 2.0 as a system of tagging platforms. That doesn't include Facebook and MySpace.

So what's going on here then. I think Mark Zuckerberg get's it right when he takes about creating graphs of meaning (I'm extending his comments slightly). I'm confused as to why we've gotten this far into the evolution of Web 2.0 and Facebook is the first company to publically disclose itself as a content managment system with nuanced edges making navigation between content nodes trivial. What's del.icio.us other than a graph of url nodes with typed edges between this nodes -- there's no reason on consider just one set of edges, Facebook as two edge types (users, groups), plus an open API for creating new edge types.

It's frustrating to me that the conversation of Web 2.0 has been so focussed on social edges between active users because there's so much more meaning that can be categorized and made accessible using these tools. The original set of companies, Flickr and Del.icio.us weren't just platforms for communicating, but systems that enabled gross categorization of human knowledge (well the part on the web). That part's mostly gone, and now you just build a site for people to find a date on.

Couldn't we somehow crowdsource an asset of considerable social value? Can't someone create the Google of this world? The data stuctures, query languages and general approaches to these problems have even been solved already using Topic Maps. What's missing is the successful commercialization of these solutions in a slick (okay maybe Ajaxy) interface that caters to people's need to categorize the web.

It's probably way to late for these solutions though. Because next batch of startups are coming that categorize dynamicaly using learning machines rather than crowdsourcing. The technical challenges here are impressive but it's nice to see a few kids here and there getting hot and bothered about these solutions. Since these systems won't have people or tags -- does that make them Web 3.0?