Living in a digital world

What is Web 2.0?

Web 2.0 is a much used and misunderstood phrase. Very often it means different things to different people causing confusion, or irritation at another cringe-worthy marketing buzzword. The phrase Web 2.0 has been taken to individually mean social networking, user generated content, AJAX and even by some people the use of white space and unusual names.

To understand the phrase we should go back to the article that originally coined the phrase – What is Web 2.0 written by Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly media. In the article O’Reilly discusses the themes of a new generation of web applications such as Gmail, Flickr, Wikipedia etc. It’s well worth a look.

However, if you don’t have time to read the whole article here is a bitesized version condensed from 15 pages to a couple of lines:

“Web 2.0 is the move to the internet as platform, and an understanding of the rules for success on that new platform. First among those rules is building applications that harness network effects to get better the more that people use them”.

A great example of the idea of internet as platform is everybody’s flavour of the month – Facebook. This article explains why the Facebook platform is such a great leap forward.

June 25, 2007 - Posted by robertjenkins | Uncategorized