Web 2.0 – Introduction

So what’s all this brew-ha-ha about Web 2.0 (pronounced web-2-point-oh by the initiated)? Well, this is one of those questions to which the answer depends on whom you ask.

What it is not, is a new release of some out-of-the-box software. It is also not some new standard for the Web developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (w3c.org), the group responsible for new standards that define how communication takes place on the web (such as how HTML should be written).

“Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. The company also publishes online through the O’Reilly Network and hosts conferences on technology topics. Tim is an activist for open source, open standards, and sensible intellectual property laws.”

In 2004, Dale Dougherty, an O’Reilly VP came up with the term Web 2.0 during a conference planning session. While the Web seemed to have crashed in the heat of the dot-com meltdown, Dougherty noted that in fact, the web had become even more important, as exciting new applications and sites were becoming more and more numerous. In addition, the companies that had survived seemed to have some common features. The first of a series of Web 2.0 conferences was launched, aimed at exploring the idea that the Web has become something qualitatively different.

Since then, the term “Web 2.0″ has clearly taken hold, with more than 9.5 million citations in Google. There remains, however, a large amount of disagreement about what exactly Web 2.0 means. Some people see it as a meaningless marketing ploy (O’Reilly conferences), while others accept it as conventional wisdom.

The O’Reilly folks see the Web as a platform. Up until now the term “platform” has described a computer and its operating system (e.g. a PC running Windows). Now the Web has become a platform. It is as though, when you sit at your computer, your platform extends off of your desk, out of the building, and across the entire Internet.

This is where Microsoft enters this story. In the browser war of 1998 Microsoft squared off in a legal battle with the then dominant Netscape. Microsoft argued at that time that a Web browser was an integral part of a computer’s operating system (i.e. part of the platform) while Netscape continued to argue that it was an independant application (like Word etc.).

But times have changed and, ironically, Microsoft now faces the eventual decline of the boxed software market (i.e. MS Office, etc.) due to the development of online applications all over the Web. As the “platform” engulfs the entire Web, it becomes a base of operations for a plethora of new applications spawned continuously from sources all over the world. Microsoft understands this shift and knows that the days of the boxed software business are numbered. This explains its interest in buying Yahoo, a last chance to own a piece of the growing Web application market.

While Web 2.0 applications involve a technical shift in the way web sites are designed they are also important as cultural phenomena. In addition to describing the evolved Web as platform, the term Web 2.0 is also a meme, a term describing an important cultural element and propogated very successfully through the culture. 

Using Web 2.0 applications Web users take control of their own data, defining when and where it will be published, by what means it can be found and with whom it can be shared.

According to O’Reilly the following core competencies define Web 2.0 applications:

services, not packaged software

architecture of participation

cost-effective scalability

re-mixable data source and data transformations

software above the level of a single device

harnessing collective intelligence

Your comments are welcome.

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