In my opinion I believe that an internet generation lasts as long as the market it represents is not saturated. In the case of Web 2.0 we are getting to the point where every social niche has a network. I think the term will become less relevant in the next year or two.

Web 2.0 is more of a Renaissance than anything. That being said, I don’t think any other generation of the internet in the near future will be as important as this one.

@DevLano
You are probably right about Web 3.0. However, I think it will be a year or two before that becomes critically important. We are getting their, but we aren’t quite there yet. Some people consider the UMPC one of Microsofts greatest failures. When really it was just way a head of its time.

Personally, I think in 2010 or 2011 will be laughing at the fact that Engadget had the UMPC as one of Microsofts 10 greatest failures. After all, a smart phone is just an underpowered UMPC. The more you add PC features to a phone the closer it becomes to a UMPC.

We’ve seen some great developments over the last several years; AJAX, the advances in Open Source, continued penetration of tools like PHP and MySQL combined with easier access to affordable hosting, and tools like Joomla and WordPress which greatly expand the ability of individuals and organizations to get their message out.

All of these are great, but the phrase “Web 2.0″ misleads the public and the non-tech-savvy media by implying there was a sudden shift from old to new, which of course never happened. It has been a gradual evolution which is still happening.

aye… marketing where would we ever do with out it?

All that the label “Web 2.0″ addresses are evolutionary changes to capabilities and services that already existed, not revolutionary ones. Facebook, for instance, is merely a combination of an IM service with a search engine and photo gallery. Twitter is just a more invasive form of IM. Web cams have existed for a long time, so the 24/7 teleconference is just an extension that came from the adoption of higher-speed Internet connectivity, which doesn’t make the waste of bandwidth as prohibitive as it once was when streamed video ate up the capacity of the entire pipe. None of this is revolutionary, worthy of identification as a “second Internet”, as the label “Web 2.0″ would indicate. It’s merely a marketing ploy.

http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A+web+2.0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Web 1.0 was way back when. Where static pages just linked to each other, and there was no dynamic code generation or data retrieval taking place.

Web 2.0 is when application based languages were created. ASP/PHP/Coldfusion and others. Using dynamic page includes and utilizing database systems to store and sort the sites content. THAT’S web 2.0.

Web 3.0 is the mobile landscape.(or so I’ve been told) which will become web 2.0 again cause phone browsers will just end up being current browsers. and things like flash lite won’t be a big deal. That’s my guess any ways.