A term often applied to a perceived ongoing transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of websites to a full-fledged computing platform serving web applications to end users. Ultimately Web 2.0 services are expected to replace desktop computing applications for many purposes. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0

A lot believe Web 2.0 is social networking and that they too can have a Web 2.0 site if it contains enough social networking tools. It’s a bit of a stretch calling web based applications that have more social features like tagging and AJAX, Web 2.0. It’s the same Web as it has been in the 90’s. Sure MySpace and YouTube are hits with 100’s of companies trying to imitate them but as far as the definition goes they are NOT expected to “replace desktop computing applications”.

Social networking is cool and in some cases even important, I like it. But, more people just sit at their screens trying to find a job, someone to hire or someone to date. Shouldn’t it be saving us time and get us out into the world of real time experience? Geocities, a Web 1.0 technology, was doing what MySpace is doing 10 years ago.

Some call blogging Web 2.0 but it’s really just another way of putting content online.If blogging is part of Web 2.0 then this site is up-to-date.

What about the myth that Web 2.0 will dramatically reducing the cost of building great software? Great software is just as hard to make as it was before, whether you use Ruby on Rails or C# or Java, and it costs about the same as well. Is open-source code Web 2.0. Nope. You still have to build something significant on top of all that open-source code you got for free to make it Web 2.0. That still takes work and a lot of money because patching together a bunch of different, sometimes unfinished or buggy, open-source tools into a coherent system to make an application like Google, a true 2.0, is obviously not simple.

Real 2.0 systems were not created in a weekend by 2 guys with a $100 budget. They are almost all large, long-term, efforts that cost real money in time and labor by dozens if not hundreds of coders.

What does this mean to the average business owners out there who believe their site needs to be Web 2.0? To demonstrate let’s look at real life businesses and the buildings that house them. A shopping mall – the entire mall – would be 2.0 when compared to a building that houses a single shop or service. This is not to say one is better than the other – it’s just the way it is. So stop worrying now.

Source: Zomzom Design