I read an interesting article in techcrunch that suggested that the term Web 2.0 is starting to fall out of favour, both as a Web search term and as a PR subject line. A quick search at Google Trends replicates these findings. It appears that the peak search time for Web 2.0 search was actually 2007, with just a blip in 2008 bringing it back up to the 2007 level, coinciding with IBM's Web 2.0 server. Google's other search data mining tool - Google Insights - which looks at search across all Google domains, shows an even more radical rise and fall.
So why the drop off in popularity of the term? Well Web 3.0 hasn't really fired up the imagination, and perhaps Web 2.0 is just starting to sound a little techy. So while there is no suggestion that the collaborative functionality that Web 2.0 tools spawned is going away, it looks like people are starting to describe it in a new way. A leading candidate is 'social media', which Google Insights shows is starting to go supernova.
How does the fall of Web 2.0 as a term equate to the rise of "WC3" and "The Semantic Web" that the WC3 consortium pushes and seems to be gaining traction, especially in the Web 3.0 conversations.
Hi Joshua - Interesting question. I've put W3C http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=WC3&cmpt=q and semantic web http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=semantic%20web&cmpt=q into Google Insights. Although both are vital for the future of the web, neither of the search terms have much mainstream traction. In fact searches for the semantic web have been on a steady decline since a peak in 2004. Anybody got any other suggestions?