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.
