CRITICISMS TO WEB 2.0

The argument exists that "Web 2.0" does not represent a new version of the World Wide Web at all, but merely continues to use so-called "Web 1.0" technologies and concepts.

Techniques such as AJAX do not replace underlying protocols like HTTP, but add an additional layer of abstraction on top of them.

Many of the ideas of Web 2.0 had already been featured in implementations on networked systems well before the term "Web 2.0" emerged. Amazon.com, for instance, has allowed users to write reviews and consumer guides since its launch in 1995

In a podcast interview, Tim Berners-Lee described the term "Web 2.0" as a "piece of jargon." "Nobody really knows what it means," he said, and went on to say that "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."

Venture capitalist Josh Kopelman noted that Web 2.0 had excited only 530,651 people (the number of subscribers at that time to TechCrunch, a Weblog covering Web 2.0 matters), too few users to make them an economically viable target for consumer applications

According to critics, Web 2.0 is not the first example of communication creating a false, hyper-inflated sense of the value of technology and its impact on culture. The dot com boom and subsequent bust in 2000 was a culmination of rhetoric of the technological sublime in terms that would later make their way into Web 2.0 jargon. Communication as culture: essays on media and society (1989) and the technologies worth as represented in the stock market. Indeed, several years before the dot com stock market crash, the then-Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan equated the run up of stock values as irrational exuberance.

The book Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (2006) even goes as far as to quote critics of the value of Web 2.0 in an attempt to acknowledge that hyper inflated expectations exist but that Web 2.0 is really different.