Web 1.0 versus Web 2.0 (for moms everywhere)

There are lots of pieces on the Web about Web 2.0. So far, I haven’t hit one piece that would explain it to my mother – this is my attempt to do so…

At its core, Web 1.0 (or the first generation of web applications) was a consumption experience. You would go to a website and read information about a product, a company or an area of interest. For early web publishers, the static website could be likened to an electronic brochure: there’s lots of ways to display information, but end user options were pretty limited in terms of interacting with that website.

Web 2.0 sites have taken a huge step forward by adding dramatic levels of interactivity to the Web user’s experience. At Web 2.0 destinations like Facebook, YouTube and MySpace you can upload your own information, hook up with friends, and share information–the website owner doesn’t provide the content–the users do.

Where Web 1.0 developers worked overtime trying to make their read-only sites ‘sticky,’ Web 2.0 sites do it seemingly effortlessly by giving users real, useful functionality that keeps them coming back. Basically the new tools create an elegant platform for others to work upon and add value – whether that is technically based or information based.

In this vein we’ve seen new Web applications that provide functionality that were traditionally the domains of desktop software – like photo manipulation, document creation, project management and much more. Traditional software already allows you to do many of these things, but the real innovation with this new approach is how people can now share information much more easily than in past from inside these applications (even to the point of working on something simultaneously). And this is totally where we will start to see the blend of desktop to network based services.

Updated booster today!

The WordPerfect Lightning team has some exciting news to share this morning!  Shortly after 9AM today we will post an updated beta of WordPerfect Lighting, integrating new features and fixes that came from your feedback and our shared vision for Lightning.

A few months ago we announced to you that we had a mission with WordPerfect Lightning to change how people work with their productivity tools. People are working differently than 20 years ago, largely due to the web, and we wanted Lightning to bridge the gap between current tools and the new ways people are working.

We want Lightning to provide value in 80% of what you do every day – a universal content viewing and aggregation platform that will meet the needs of people who consume many types of content and who are gradually migrating away from the traditional productivity paradigm as defined by Microsoft Office.

In this release we focused on making Lightning: better at acquiring and reusing content; easier to use and; even more valuable by expanding our partner ecosystem.

We have expanded the range of content we support in Lightning to add new image and text formats. You can easily view, reuse and store images (jpg, gif, etc.) in Lightning by simply dragging them onto the Navigator (same with other formats like .txt). And with new Note enhancements, including drag-and-drop and right click “copy to Note” capabilities, working with content and Notes is much faster and easier. But perhaps my favorite addition is our new support for WordPress.

Blogs are becoming more popular for business and consumer users alike. For a tool like Lightning, which seeks to help users move their content from one place to another, blog support is very desirable – as several of you have noted in your feedback.  Our first supported blog platform is WordPress, and I think it’s a great fit. WordPress’ reputation among serious bloggers is unparalleled, but more importantly, its open SDK and strong support for images makes it easy for users to blog pretty much whatever information they’ve collected in Lightning – especially all those images you can work with now.

Finally, we provided specific user enhancements on how you told us you wanted to work – Lightning now: allows you to “pin” notes to the top of your windows; improves the Notes experience and performance and integrates more seamlessly with other online services like JaJah for VoIP.

Take a look at the new beta and let us know what you think! In the next few days and weeks Tom and I will be posting more actively on this release to share information on the new features and discuss your feedback.