So, what is Web 2.0?
There's a strange phenomenon occuring here in San Fran at the Web 2.0 expo. The people at the Web 2.0 expo booth have been giving out T-Shirts this week that say "Web 2.0 is" and then there is a white rectangle that one can write on with a marker. In this way a person is allowed to express what they think Web 2.0 is. All of the little white rectangles have remained blank.
I think leaving the shirts blank is very significant because it allows people who see the shirt - let's call these people the users - to fill in the blank themselves. It allows Web 2.0 to be anything that the user can imagine.
But alas, our boss didn't send us out here to find out that the Web 2.0 is a blank box on a T-shirt. So, here's kind of a summary. Web 2.0 is about collaboration. It's the collective use of many small parts taken from here and placed over there with other parts that have been taken from everywhere else. It's less about a place on the web and more about the web being everywhere we go with or without a computer. A simple analogy might be that Web 2.0 is like air. It's everywhere around us and it's a part of everything we do, except where air is passive Web 2.0 is active and interactive.
I could sit here and bore you with what the Web 2.0 is made up of (i.e. mash-ups, widgets, badges, etc), but that's not really the point. Those are pieces and parts of Web 2.0. What we're really looking for is what it is. The bottom line is that the Web 2.0 is about the user regardless of where the user is or what s/he is doing.
The t-shirts are right... Web 2.0 is ______________________.
1 comment:
Software business has just begun a significant turn in their strategy to provide services instead of software. During the next few years, you will see more service offerings than product offerings at a very reasonalble and competitive rate. (as per drink basis). This may be a threat to the small business owners and small scale software developers. People will use pre fabricated APIs which are very easy to integrate to existing systems. On the other hand people may get lot of services, like blogs, image storages, etc at zero cost. We will see lots of business merges,
as a result of fighting for survival among large scale companies.
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