What’s the characteristic difference between Web 1.0 and 2.0? While I can’t come up with a unified theory of this, I do believe that one the most striking differences is the ratio between male and female users - opposed to Web 1.0, Web 2.0 is for girls, (too).
As they say, “a bunch of anecdotes isn’t data”. However, all I got so far to substantiate this claim are intuitions. I will try to come up with some data in a follow-up post.

I installed Skype about one and a half years ago when some geek friend of mine sent me the dmg via Bluetooth during a boring lecture. I found it pretty cool right away, but I doubted that it would be very useful unless I could get all of my not-so technoligible friends (including many girls) to use it, too.
But I was amazed about what I found with Skype’s user search feature: While I couldn’t find most of my Web 1.0 savvy friends, I did find a lot of female friends that I went to school with.
After “Skyping” them (hint for startups that are looking for a “kewl” domain name: make sure you can use it as a verb), I learned that most of them were not only on Skype, but also had accounts on Last.fm and Flickr. And again, this wasn’t the case with many of my web 1.0-savvy male friends, who all had their private (mostly SciFi style) homepage back in the 90s.
Girls who, back then, usually lost any interest in a conversation as soon as guys started to talk about “the internet” became passionate writers and readers of blogs - many guys who were passionate about their private homepages in the late 90s somehow must have got lost in playing Counterstrike, given that some of them haven’t even heard of blogs, podcasting or social networking at all. And (now I become polemic) the ones who have heard of Web 2.0 usually rant about how all of the above are mere buzzwords invented by greedy and stupid marketers.

But firstly, what could be the reason for girls to be so attracted to the web all of a sudden?

• Talkativeness: Web 2.0 let’s people speak their mind. Be it with a blog, images on Flickr, videos on Youtube or pink pages on MySpace - users have the opportunity to become publishers of their own ideas, thoughts and imaginations, instead of being mere consumers of the elite media caste dictation. It’s a commonplace (aka I do not have a scientific study at hand that proofs it) that women generally are more communicative than men - this is not meant to be an euphemism for “chatty” - in fact they seem to get the essential ideas and opportunities of Web 2.0 much better than many guys do.
• Code isn’t sexy: In the late 90s, people had to learn at least some html to become content creators (aka homepage owners) - a justifyable turn-off for many (especially for the girls not interested in techstuff). No doubts about code being extremly important, but it just isn’t and will never be a sexy thing for the majority of people.
  What Web 2.0 has proven is that code can result in sexiness: Well-designed webpages, intuitive and aesthetic interfaces and a general feel of not-having-to-see-the-code that underlies this experience.
  These days everyone can become a content creator, without even knowing what html is. That’s a good thing, just as it is a good thing to be able to speak grammatically correct without ever having heard of Noam Chomsky.
  By overcoming those technical obstacles, the web has suddenly become attractive to those who usually care the least about coding, which includes the majority of girls (and admittedly myself, since I am, with most certainty, one of the worst programmers ever).
• Natural Networkers: Neuroscientist Professor Baron-Cohen has an interesting theory claiming that the autistic brain is just an exxageration of the normal male brain. And in fact, men, more often than not, tend to be loners (an ideal which is also promoted by many role models in movies and novels).
  Women, on the other hand, seem to be the more natural networkers when it comes to social interaction.
  Now here’s some kind of data: I just chatted about this with Ehssan Dariani, the founder of studiVZ (a german social networking platform for students, comparable to Facebook) - he confirmed that female users tend to invite more new users to the system than males do, even though the probability for a female invitee to actually enter the system is lower than it is for males.
  Also, the ratio between girls and guys in studiVZ mirrors the gender ratio of German universities. I find that astonishing, given that there are much more guys studying computer science and other web-related stuff than girls do.
  There is another interesting correlation that Esshan pointed me to:
  It seems that the willingness of a girl to sign up increases with the number of other people from her university that already have accounts.
  All of this matches my assumptions about the higher interest of girls in social networking. While a guy might enter the platform as the only user from his university, girls prefer to be where “the others are” and exhibit a stronger eagerness in inviting new people.
  (Thanks to Ehssan for this info!)
  An interesting side effect of this is that males (usually) want tend to flock where the girls are, so if you managed to have girls using your social networking service, you’ll get the boys for free.
  (As an aside, this kind of reminds me of what I’ve heard about a club in Freiburg, Germany: Until 11, the club is open only to girls who then get free drinks. After 11, they open their gates for the queue of boys who had to wait outside (aka raptors). In either case this probably works out fine for the owner of the club, since a.) the girls stay and everyone is partying (aka spending money) or b.) most of the girls leave and the boys are left with expensive beverages to quench their frustration with )

Even though I’ve just expressed some intuitions so far, I do believe that the Web 2.0 movement will be dominated and shaped more and more by the needs of a female userbase.
Entrepreneurs and marketers should keep that in mind.
I will try to do some research into this to come up with some numbers/statistics to fortify this claim.
Until then, enjoy Tasha and her friend on YouTube:

technorati tags: web 2.0,gender,users,startups,

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