The term was popularized by Tim O'Reilly and Dale Dougherty at the O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 Conference in late 2004, though it was coined by Darcy DiNucci in 1999.The term was popularized by Tim O'Reilly and Dale Dougherty at the O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 Conference in late 2004, though it was coined by Darcy DiNucci in 1999.
Web 2.0 does not refer to an update to any technical specification, but to changes in the way Web pages are designed and used.
A Web 2.0 website may allow users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators of user-generated content in a virtual community.
This is in stark contrast to the first generation in the Web 1.0 era when people were limited to the passive viewing of content.
Whether Web 2.0 is substantively different from prior Web technologies has been challenged by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, who describes the term as jargon. His original vision of the Web was "a collaborative medium, a place where we [could] all meet and read and write." On the other hand, the term Semantic Web (sometimes referred to as Web 3.0) was coined by Berners-Lee to refer to a web of content where the meaning can be processed by machines.
Web 1.0 is a retronym referring to the first stage of the World Wide Web's evolution. According to authors Cormode, G. and Krishnamurthy, B. (2008):
"Content creators were few in Web 1.0 with the vast majority of users simply acting as consumers of content."
Personal web pages were common, consisting mainly of static pages hosted on ISP-run web servers, or on free web hosting services such as GeoCities. With the advent of Web 2.0, it was more common for the average web user to have social networking profiles on sites such as Myspace and Facebook, as well as personal blogs on one of the new low-cost web hosting services or a dedicated blog host like Blogger or LiveJournal. The content for both was generated dynamically from stored content, allowing for readers to comment directly on pages in a way that was not previously common.
Some Web 2.0 capabilities were present in the early years, but they were implemented differently. For example, a Web 1.0 site may have had a guestbook page to publish visitor comments, instead of a comment section at the end of each page. Server performance and bandwidth considerations had to be taken into account, and a long comments thread on each page could potentially slow down the site. Terry Flew, in his 3rd edition of New Media, described the differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0:
"A move from personal websites to blogs and blog site aggregation, from publishing to participation, from web content as the outcome of large up-front investment to an ongoing and interactive process, and from content management systems to links based on tagging website content using keywords [see folksonomy]".
Flew believed it to be the above factors that form the basic change in trends that resulted in the onset of the Web 2.0 "craze".
The term "Web 2.0" was first used in January 1999 by Darcy DiNucci, an information architecture consultant. In her article, Fragmented Future, DiNucci writes:
"The Web we know now, which loads into a browser window in essentially static screenfuls, is only an embryo of the Web to come. The first glimmerings of Web 2.0 are beginning to appear, and we are just starting to see how that embryo might develop. The Web will be understood not as screenfuls of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens."
The term Web 2.0 did not resurface until 2002. These authors focus on the concepts currently associated with the term where, as Scott Dietzen puts it, "the Web becomes a universal, standards-based integration platform".
In 2004, the term began its rise in popularity when O'Reilly Media and MediaLive hosted the first Web 2.0 conference. In their opening remarks, John Battelle and Tim O'Reilly outlined their definition of the "Web as Platform," where software applications are built upon the Web as opposed to upon the desktop.
The unique aspect of this migration, they said, is that "customers are building your business for you". They argued that the activities of users generating content in the form of ideas, text, videos, or pictures, could be harnessed to create value.
O'Reilly and Battelle contrasted Web 2.0 with what they called "Web 1.0". They associated Web 1.0 with the business models of Netscape and the Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
For example, Netscape saw 'the web as platform' in terms of the old software paradigm whereby their flagship product was the browser built as a desktop application. Their strategy was to use their dominance in the browser market to create a new market for high-priced server products. Control over standards for displaying content and applications in the browser would, in theory, give Netscape the kind of market power enjoyed by Microsoft in the PC arena.
Much like the "horseless carriage" framed the automobile as an extension of the familiar, Netscape promoted its concept of the "webtop" to replace the desktop, and planned to populate that webtop with information updates and applets pushed to the webtop by information providers who would purchase Netscape servers.
In short, Netscape focused on creating software, releasing updates and bug fixes, and distributing it to the end users.
O'Reilly contrasted this with Google, a company that did not immediately focus on producing end-user software. Google focused on providing a service based on data such as the links Web page authors make between sites.
Google exploits this user-generated content to offer Web search results based on reputation through its PageRank algorithm.
Unlike software, which undergoes scheduled releases, Google's Web services are constantly updated, a process called "the perpetual beta."
A similar difference can be seen between the Encyclopædia Britannica Online and Wikipedia. While Britannica relies on experts to write articles and releases them periodically in publications, Wikipedia relies on trust in anonymous community members to constantly write and edit content.
Wikipedia editors are not required to have educational credentials, such as degrees, in the subjects in which they are editing. Wikipedia is not based on subject-matter expertise, but rather on an adaptation of the open source software adage that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow".
This maxim is stating that if enough users are able to look at a software product's code (or a website's content), then these users will be able to fix any bugs or other problems. Wikipedia's volunteer editor community produces, edits and updates articles constantly with this crowd-fix philosophy in mind.
"It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge on Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network at YouTube; and the online metropolis known as MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing - and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes."
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