Everyone is talking about it! But do we actually know what Web 2.0 means? Even when looking at jobs advertised in the UK one finds that companies require web developers to have “experience in Web 2.0”, which I find quite interesting.
So what’s Web 2.0? (extracted from Wikipedia)
Web 2.0 is a phrase coined by O’Reilly Media in 2003 (and later popularized by the first Web 2.0 conference in 2004) in reference to a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services — such as social-networking sites, wikis and folksonomies — which facilitate collaboration and sharing between users. O’Reilly Media titled a series of conferences around the phrase, and it has since become widely adopted.
Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to Web technical specifications, but to changes in the ways software developers and end-users use the web as a platform. According to Tim O’Reilly, “Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.”
The O’Reilly website has discribed Web 2.0 like this:
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 |
see whole article
So Web 2.0 is the same old World Wide Web and its technologies being used in a completely new way, with more interaction, user contribution and freedom of expression.
Also read: Not 2.0?
Web 2.0 also represents the freedom to be able to move information in and out of web systems – which is why facebook is much more web 2.0 than something like myspace that is difficult to move info in and out of