ETech Day 2: What is Web 2.0?

By Robert Kaye
March 8, 2006 | Comments: 1

Last October I attended the Web 2.0 conference and all during the conference I was trying to put my finger on what Web 2.0 really means. And even after the conference I still wasn't quite certain what it meant. The lack of a clear definition for Web 1.0 only adds to the problem -- if the first version isn't well defined, how can you define the second version?

Here at ETech, I think I finally got an answer! Yesterday afternoon during Tim Bray's presentation on Atom he mentioned that his boss, Hal Stern, obvererved that if you replace 2.0 with writeable it makes a lot more sense. Web 2.0 is the writable web and the Web 1.0 was the read-only web.

Compare the killer apps from the dot com boom -- early search engines, online stores and tons of static web pages -- with the killer apps of Web 2.0: Blogs, Wikis, Flickr. These sites all involve the user as an active participant, where the user can modify the web content.

And now the term Web 2.0 makes sense to me.

Do you have any other suggestions for how to define Web 2.0?

Comments (1)
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1 Comments

myvideopodcast said:

Hotmail was the start of Web 2.0
Brilliant!
To define web 2.0 as "writable" would definitely enable more people to understand it better.

Little do many of us realise or admit is that the father of web 2.0 is Sabeer Bhatia who commercially launched Hotmail on July 4, 1996, Independence Day.

Hotmail made our so called prefered Operating System arbitrary.

Hotmail was undeniably the first Web 2.0 app.
Come July 4th will be a good 10 years.

Any tribute or write up on this day would be fantastic.

March 19, 2006 3:41 AM