Four years on from the first serious attempt to define Web 2.0,
there is no firm consensus about
what constitutes Web 2.0.
Companies identified by analysts such as Forrester and Gartner
as eager to harness Web 2.0 seem to be less interested in
technology, than
the potential of Web 2.0 "social networking" phenomena, modeled
on Facebook and its peers, to improve collaboration within the
company, and to encourage customers to give up information about
themselves, and feedback about products and services. For
some businesses though this provides as much concern as
opportunity.
But other companies, facing an expected cut in IT budgets, are
excited by the prospects of equipping end-users with the power
to write their own applications with freely-downloadable tools and
components.
Inventor of the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee has said that
some of the supposedly defining characteristics of Web 2.0, such as
collaboration and user involvement, are what the web was supposed
to be about all along. He has pointed out, as others have, that
Amazon was incorporating user-generated content (book reviews began
in 1996) and Rest (Representational State Transfer) in its
developments long before the term Web 2.0 came into use. So in
effect, we are simply at a later stage of Web 1.0.
Meanwhile the dawn of Web 3.0 is already being proclaimed by
excitable technology columnists, marketing people clutching at the
next big thing, and developers who want the Web 2.0 brand
buried.
In 2005, respected developers' handbook publisher
Tim O'Reilly set down in detail what separated Web 1.0 from Web
2.0.
Further reading - more ComputerWeekly articles on Web
2.0
Make Web 2.0 deliver business benefits
APIs lead the way to better interoperability
Web 2.0 - what does it constitute
How to prevent social networking from damaging your
business
Wake up to the dawn of Web 2.0