Lately, I have been hearing a lot about Web 2.0 - not just from the usual SDM software geeks like Yoav, Robbie, and Ilana but from other people who aren't software centric. Yesterday, I was asked "Hey MIT guy, you should know this. What is Web 2.0?" I shrugged and then proceeded to B.S. my way through by saying that Web 2.0 is a new paradigm in the Internet and it has something to do with AJAX, which makes the web is more interactive and blah blah.... The truth is I had no idea what I was talking about. Nonetheless he accepted my explanation and said "So it is like web services and wikipedia, huh?", which I then answered with a grin, "Exactly."
Being a geek myself (yeah, high marks on the geek test done 2 weeks ago), I felt embarrassed for not knowing what Web 2.0 is. So I did a little googling and found this out. Coined by Dale Dougherty, an associate at O'Reilly Media, Web 2.0 is a term that is used to describe the transformation of the Internet from an information-based architecture to a user-centric platform with applications and services centered around user's needs. Technologies like blogs, bit torrent, wikis, rss, web services, and of course AJAX (I was right after all) contribute to the evolution. This technological shift has social and economical implications. The empowerment of individual users through open communication, knowledge sharing, and decentralization led to radical changes in social networks and behaviors. For example, blogging has now replaced personal website as a form of communicating one's thoughts to friends and the rest of the word. Last but not least, new businesses, with Google being the prime example, have already started to exploit the potential of Web 2.0 by offering software products that intimately involve the users in the development cycle. Here are some good links for further reading on Web 2.0.
| 12/1/2005 4:11:39 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00) |
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