When Tim O’Reilly first defined Web 2.0 it helped define an emerging industry surrounding new web technologies following the bust of the internet bubble. Yesterday afternoon I read a post about Tim O’Reilly course correcting the definition. The definition was ultimately being expanded to include Google as part of Web 2.0. I found it somewhat entertaining as ultimately Web 2.0 is really nothing more then the internet.

While we can place terms for the evolution of how human’s leverage the power of the technologies provided by the web, ultimately the web continues to evolve and no matter what application are built to harness the power of it, it is still simply the internet. Humans simply weren’t used to what is ultimately a “many to many” communication platform instead of one to one as most communication was prior to the web.

To be honest, I even have used the term “social web” as though there is a subset of the web focused on communication and technologies which help improve our ability to socialize (or “communicate”). The entire web is about communication though and ultimately we are simply integrating the tools that leverage the power of the web to more effectively communicate.

As such any terms which attempt to define anything outside of digital transactions (including “Web 2.0″, the “social web”, etc) is simply placing a term for what is ultimately humans striving to leverage the web to communicate more efficiently. I guess defining terms is a way for us to create a sense of place and time and make us feel like we are progressing.

Let’s stop making “Web 2.0″ products though. What we really need to build is great products and tools that help us communicate more effectively. That’s it.

The Financial Times had an interesting article this morning which suggests that Web 2.0 has substantial problems with generating revenue. I’m not sure that this news is much of a shocker given the increased discussion recently about revenue generating businesses. Another highlight of the article is the discussion about ridiculous valuations being given to some of these companies.

One of the most infamous investment which produced a sky-high valuation is Slide who was able to obtain a $500 million valuation. According to some insiders though, the investors in Slide are not sure why they produced such a crazy valuation. RockYou, a competitor to Slide, has also been facing difficulty in raising a new round of funding and instead opted to raise $1 million while continuing their search for favorable terms.

Regardless of valuations, social features will continue the trend toward ubiquity as the new social data “portability” services begin to launch in the coming months. Nobody has yet to develop a large scale sustainable model of monetization and given the current economic environment, it is likely that the trend continues. This trend leads to the question of: what are web 2.0 entrepreneurs expecting out of their investments?

I think that most of these companies were hoping for future acquisitions by Google, Microsoft or Yahoo! Others were intending to generate revenue from advertising but unfortunately I don’t see that as a long-term sustainable model since inventory is practically infinite at this point. Do you think we’ll begin to see more legitimate business models or do web 2.0 companies not need substantial revenue?

Not long ago, Web 2.0 was a thing that social media people gave advice on, developers and designers laughed at and the majority of people had no idea what the heck was going on. At the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco this week, there has been a bunch of buzz about nothing. Tom Foremski calls it “Web Two-Point Yawn.”

The “tools of Web 2.0″ have become ubiquitous for the most part and those that get it, get it. Dan Farber sums it up when he describes Tim O’Reilly’s keynote last night:

We are entering the world of ambient computing, he proclaimed, as everything is wired into the Internet. “We are in a soup of computing. Web 2.0 is all around us,” O’Reilly said. He got nods from the crowd of the converted, who were busy Twittering, Facebooking, blogging, and SMSing, practicing continuous partial attention.

Most of us have heard the schpiel before and now we are active participants in the social web. While there is innovation taking place every day, we are now more connected then we have ever been and it’s difficult to see how more connected we could become without literally being attached to everybody we know at the hip.

The people who are now adopting to the new technologies appear to be enterprise companies and soon enough we will be on to the next big wave, whatever that may be. We can imagine our lives as if a character in a science fiction novel but ultimately I believe we are close to maximizing the utility of social technologies.

New tools will pop up daily that help transform the way we connect but an industry has now been created and it’s time to get to work on making these tools work for businesses. That’s where the money is to be made. We have now been living with these social tools for years now and are great at socializing via the web.

As Steve Perlman implies in his interview with Charles Cooper of CNET News.com, it’s time for real innovation. He claims, “Most of what you see here will be obsolete in three or four years.” I guess Twitter and others better start working on generating revenue then!