What Is Web 2.0 ?

There has been a lot of talk going around with new websites coming up with Web 2.0 buzzword and i wanted to dig into it to actually see what this means and what defines a website with Web 2.0 technology?

The concept of "Web 2.0" began after the dot com crash with a conference brainstorming session between O'Reilly and MediaLive International. They initiated talks that the sites that survived the dot com crash had something in common, and the dot-com collapse marked some kind of turning point for the web.

Thus emerged the Web 2.0 concept where we should be looking at it as a set of principles and practices that tie together a certain level of standards that has to be met by the website to be categorized as Web 2.0. The Meme map here kind of delineates such standards and services one would be expecting.

O'Reilly has a lot of work in progress in this domain and have come up with some initial thoughts on this matter. If Netscape was the standard bearer for Web 1.0, Google is most certainly the standard bearer for Web 2.0 and some technologies used by a website most likely delineates Web 2.0 from Web 1.0 as listed below.


Web 1.0 --> Web 2.0
DoubleClick --> Google AdSense
Ofoto --> Flickr
Akamai --> BitTorrent
mp3.com --> Napster
Britannica Online --> Wikipedia
personal websites --> blogging
evite --> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation --> search engine optimization
page views --> cost per click
screen scraping --> web services
publishing --> participation
content management systems --> wikis
directories (taxonomy) --> tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness --> syndication