The bursting of the dot-com bubble in the fall of 2001 marked a turning point for the web. The first Web 2.0 Conference was held in 2004 following the discussion by Internet business leaders about how the Web was changing.
The big idea: The Web has become a platform, a foundation upon which thousands of new businesses would emerge. The Web has become a living platform, much different from the previous idea of software as a static product installed from a disk. The Web as a software platform no longer delivers software in a release cycle, but as a continuously improving service.
Harnessing Collective Intelligence
The primary difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is the ability to harness collective intelligence.
eBay started as a e-commerce static content solution and migrated into a dynamic content solution based on collective activity of all its users, like the web itself, eBay grows organically in response to user activity. The role of the company changed to a content enabler. Enabling users to publish their own products and promote user activity with generated content based on previous user activity and interest.
Amazon.com sells the same products as its competitor Barnsandnoble.com. But, Amazon has made a science of user engagement. They have 10 times more product reviews, invitations to participate in a variety of ways on virtually every page – and even more importantly, they use user activity to produce better search results. The result from a search on Amazon returns the ‘most popular’ products in real-time based on previous sales and the likelihood of your personal interest in the product.
The content on these popular websites has become so filled with users input that the ownership of the service and its content comes into question: Who owns the data?
Leveraging Customer Self-Service
Web 2.0 leverages customer self-service as customers benefit from information from each other, which is collected, organized and presented back to other customer. This is done with constructs like polls, forums, blogs, e-newsletters and frequently asked questions.
Leveraging customer self-service also helps reduce the burden and cost of customer service. Limitless information can be organized into searchable websites to answer every question a customer could have.
Blogging
One of the most highly touted features of Web 2.0 is the rise of blogging. Personal home pages have been around since the early days of the web, but blogging has moved to the next level. At its basic form, a blog is just a personal home page in diary format.
As harnessing collective intelligence is an essential part of Web 2.0, blogging has turned the web into a kind of global brain, a blogosphere which is the equivalent of constant mental chatter. It may not reflect the deep structure of the brain, which is both conscious and unconscious, but it is the collective conscious thought. The blogosphere or collective thought has become a powerful force.
Mainstream media would like to see each blog as a competitor, but what is really unnerving is that the competition is actually with the entire blogosphere. This is not just a competition between sites, but a competition between business models. The blogosphere is taking power away from the few top media executives and spreading it across the Internet. Most of the major media companies have been slow to find a home on the Internet, and as a result have suffered and are currently under a lot of competitive pressure.
Multi-Device
Web 2.0 services are moving past the computer monitor to the PDA. Everyone can access information wherever they are from their hand-held PDA, cell-phone or iPhone.
Web 2.0 Driving Technologies
Here is a list of the technologies that are driving Web 2.0
WebServices / SOAP / XML
AJAX / JavaScript
Blogging / RSS
Podcasting