Can we stop talking about Web 2.0? It's confusing my friends.

I found out last week that at least one person I know thinks Web 2.0 is a new and better version of the Internet, just released. My smart but non-geek friend asked me if, in order to view "Web 2.0 sites" like del.icio.us and Flickr, he needed to download Firefox. Someone had told him Firefox was "the Web 2.0 browser." No, I said, any current browser should be okay, but my friend insisted that he wanted "all the new Web 2.0 features."

I was reminded of how America Online used to promote itself with new versions of its software in the 1990s -- "AOL 3.0! Now with new and better buttons!"

But as I told my friend, there is no new version of the Web. It's true that we're probably doing better with search, collaboration, and content sharing, but this is a continuation of 15 years several decades of work, an evolution rather than a revolution.

One of the ways we're solving these problems is by a greater emphasis on nurturing and drawing on collective knowledge. This is the basis for Google's more effective search technology, which ranks Web pages based on who links to them and in what ways. Sites like del.icio.us depend on individual sharing and classification of information, and then aggregate it to make it more useful. While this sort of participation is central to many new Web services, older dot.coms such as Amazon have been doing it for a long time.

I've heard these technologies called "social technology" or "social software." Bart Decrem, founder and former CEO of Flock, calls this the "Participatory Web." All of these terms are preferable to Web 2.0, which is being used in so many contexts -- design, marketing, coding -- that it has ended up not meaning much of anything.