O'Reilly and Battelle chose "2.0," the language of "versioning," to describe their conference. They did so more to distance themselves from the failures of the dot-com boom than to describe a paradigm shift in technological innovation. Indeed, "the web as platform"—the vague explanation of the term used by O'Reilly and Battelle—did not describe a singular technological innovation, nor did it mark the beginning of "social software" or "social media." Paul Graham, an attendee and future founder of Y Combinator, an incubator for young entrepreneurs, wrote: "I don't think there was any deliberate plan to suggest there was a new version of the web. They just wanted to make the point that the web mattered again. It was a kind of semantic deficit spending: they knew new things were coming, and the "2.0" referred to whatever those might turn out to be." In fact, most of the technologies described as "Web 2.0" existed before the term was coined, including wikis, online journals, blogs, user-generated content, and online community.

Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, loc. 148