We all are hearing a lot about web 2.0 (My weblog’s tagline itself reads “What I’m doing while building a web 2.0 startup”). There are hundreds of sites calling themselves web 2.0 and hundreds more I’m sure waiting to be called one. In the west (Silicon Valley primarily), the web 2.0 craze has been going on for quite a while. In fact, there are people already predicting Armageddon for web 2.0 (sorry…lost the reference link to that story in the information overload I’m under) though I don’t subscribe to that view.
In India though I think it is just about catching up. There are a lot of sites that have come up in the recent past that are riding the web 2.0 bandwagon. So, what is this web 2.0 hype all about?
What better place than O’reilly website to explain web 2.0? You can follow the link to get a full picture of what web 2.0 is: http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
The core of the article can be understood from the picture below
So, a company can claim to be web 2.0 if it complies with one of the 6 core competencies listed above. The more the compliance the more you move from the periphery to the gravitational core.
Amidst all this technological hype, one thing that needs to be understood is that, the competencies and qualities mentioned above have been around even during the web 1.0 days. These are things that are not really new or radical. The competencies are more like generally accepted (and obvious) principles that are necessary for a successful internet business. So, my understanding of Web 2.0 is that it is a set of guidelines that when followed “practically” will get you on the path of success. I stress the word “practically” because; a business cannot lose focus on what it wants to do in trying to be web 2.0 compliant.
Finally, I find it rather amusing that Web 2.0 (watch the versioning 2.0) is called so when one of the key principles of Web 2.0 is perpetual beta and doing away with releases and version numbers!!!
Posted by paddy 