What the Heck Is Web 2.0?

Written by Monica Rowland

In case you were wondering what this new term is that is being thrown around like a baseball on opening day at Yankee Stadium.... I thought I would post a few things to help you out. Now if you don't know what it means, don't feel badly... because most people don't. Even people participating in it, using it and in some cases LIVING it! (You know who you are! You fall asleep in front of your laptop each night on your bed. You are on facebook, MY Space or your favorite blog. Then you wake up with the light on at 4:00am, and a crick in your neck. Yeah..that's you!)

Web 2.0 is the new generation of the internet. It's the internet's offspring or baby so to speak. It is a term that encompasses the entire phenomenon of social networking, blogging, Instant Messaging, and so forth. It is used to describe the world of places on the web like this blog, or other applications like My Space, Facebook, LinkedIn, Classmates.com, Yahoo Instant Messenger, Wikipedia, Second Life, Google Adsense, Napster..... and believe me the list goes on and on!

By now you are probably scratching your head and thinking... "Hey! I am pretty web savvy! How did I miss this baby shower?" Well... you didn't. It sort of just happened. Tech companies came up with one thing after another over time, and now there are really too many of these programs and applications to count.

To describe it better... I thought I should get a "real" definition for you. This is a very long but informative article....however; I only provided a short excerpt. You can read the rest on your own. :wink:

(excerpt from an article What is Web 2.0? by Tim O'Reilly)
http://www.oreilly.de/artikel/web20.html

The concept of "Web 2.0" began with a conference brainstorming session between O'Reilly and MediaLive International. Dale Dougherty, web pioneer and O'Reilly VP, noted that far from having "crashed", the web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity. What's more, the companies that had survived the collapse seemed to have some things in common. Could it be that the dot-com collapse marked some kind of turning point for the web, such that a call to action such as "Web 2.0" might make sense? We agreed that it did, and so the Web 2.0 Conference was born.

In the year and a half since, the term "Web 2.0" has clearly taken hold, with more than 9.5 million citations in Google. But there's still a huge amount of disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means, with some people decrying it as a meaningless marketing buzzword, and others accepting it as the new conventional wisdom.

This article is an attempt to clarify just what we mean by Web 2.0.

In our initial brainstorming, we formulated our sense of Web 2.0 by example:

Web 1.0		Web 2.0
DoubleClick	-->	Google AdSense
Ofoto	-->	Flickr
Akamai	-->	BitTorrent
mp3.com	-->	Napster
Britannica Online	-->	Wikipedia
personal websites	-->	blogging
evite	-->	upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation	-->	search engine optimization
page views	-->	cost per click
screen scraping	-->	web services
publishing	-->	participation
content management systems	-->	wikis
directories (taxonomy)	-->	tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness	-->	syndication

The list went on and on. But what was it that made us identify one application or approach as "Web 1.0" and another as "Web 2.0"? (The question is particularly urgent because the Web 2.0 meme has become so widespread that companies are now pasting it on as a marketing buzzword, with no real understanding of just what it means. The question is particularly difficult because many of those buzzword-addicted startups are definitely not Web 2.0, while some of the applications we identified as Web 2.0, like Napster and BitTorrent, are not even properly web applications!) We began trying to tease out the principles that are demonstrated in one way or another by the success stories of web 1.0 and by the most interesting of the new applications.