Defining Web 2.0
The dot.com crash occurred around the start of this millennium. As this crash occurred people’s confidence in the internet fell and as a result a lot of people believed that the internet was overhyped. However, there was some who believed that the internet was going to grow and finally realize its full potential. (Shuen, 2008)
Initially we used the internet to search for information. This has changed within the last decade. The internet has moved from being static to interactive. We now use it to create and share information and to engage and collaborate with other users. (Phillippi, Buxton, 2010)
The concept of Web 2.0 was developed in 2004. O’Reilly Media and Media Live developed this concept as they believed that rather than use of the internet declining, the internet was going to grow in importance. They were holding a series of conferences and named these conferences as Web 2.0. (O’Reilly Media, 2005)
During O’Reilly Media and MediaLive’s conferences they gave the static internet the term Web 1.0 and the interactive internet that was developing was called Web 2.0. (Click, Petit, 2008) Tim O’Reilly, the founder of O’Reilly Media, has defined Web 2.0 as:
Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an "architecture of participation," and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences. (O’ Reilly Radar, 2005)
This definition is hard to understand. Most definitions of Web 2.0 tend to be very complicated and hard to understand and there is no definitive definition of Web 2.0. Even Tim O’Reilly has defined Web 2.0 more than once. Trying again to define what exactly Web 2.0 was O’Reilly said that:
Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. (O’Reilly Radar, 2006)
In the opinion of the author the best way to understand Web 2.0 is to compare Web 1.0 with Web 2.0.
