Web 2.0: The ‘What’
With Justin Souter of Souter Consulting
Part 2 of a series of articles on the application of Web 2.0
The ‘What’ of Web 2.0 can be difficult to pin down. Tim O’Reilly’s original description doesn’t give a succinct definition. However, the analyst Forrester defines Web 2.0 as:
“A set of technologies and applications that enable efficient interaction among people, content, and data in support of collectively fostering new businesses, technology offerings, and social structures.”
The Gartner Group - another analyst, reckons there are three clusters:
- "Technology and architecture” – how the back-end technical stuff has changed (ask your Web people); also Really Simple Syndication (RSS), which is like email in that it brings web content to your desktop.
- "Community and social” - the familiar tools like blogging, wikis, also social networking, and micro-blogging tools like Twitter. There seem to be limitless others!
- "Business and process” -
- e.g. a “mashup“: a website or application which combines two or more data feeds, the classic example being Housingmaps - taking data from Google maps and Craigslist classified adverts
- also Software as a Service (SaaS) - where an application is hosted and delivered without dedicated desktop software and often used through a web browser (e.g. Google Mail)
n.b. although I will mention 1 & 3 above, these articles will mainly deal with the community and social side of things.
Web 2.0, as its name suggests, is the latest development of Tim Berners-Lee’s brilliant idea. The main distinguishing feature of Web 2.0 is that users have been given tools to create content for themselves – e.g. YouTube’s strapline is “Broadcast Yourself”.
Web 2.0 is also mindset issue and a generational one. Young people, who have grown up with computers, are happy to share personal information online: this is the direct opposite to older people, who view this as a vital privacy / security issue.
The power these tools put in our hands has created a grave threat to the traditional broadcasting and publishing industries (not to mention music).Whilst some believe that the ‘lunatics have taken over the asylum’, I contend that once we have learned / made up a broadly acceptable slate of new rules, there is much to be gained.
Things to bear in mind:
Feel free to ask any questions at bdaily.info or on my own site, and join us next Wednesday when we’ll be looking at the ‘why’ of Web 2.0.
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Comments 1
david coxon
Posted 560 days ago
I think that the best way to explain what web 2.0 is to say its a change from monologue to dialogue.
It you compare what we call web2.0 now to what came before, the original websites were like a one way street, content creators wrote sites (like press releases or a brochure) and published them on the internet there was no feed back or discusssion. Then came web 2.0 you could not only see a site, but you could participate in it, you could add comments (like this one), you could even upload you own image or video, and other users could comment on that.
This then lead to sites like wikipedia where the users created all the content themselves and to all manor of social networking sites like facebook, and chat based sites like twitter.
These then lead on to things like mash ups where text, images, videos, map data, in fact almost any user content could be collected accross the internet and made into something more useful. The whole adding to more that sum of the parts. (startinging to sound like nuclear physics - guess thats a good time to stop!)