Web 2.0 - What is it?
Toni on Aug 31st 2006
Every Monday our local newspaper features a technology section, this week the subject was Web 2.0 technology and listed websites and their domain names. The concept of Web 2.0 has been around for a few years. In fact the third Web 2.0 Conference will be held this November at the Palace Hotel in the heart of downtown San Francisco.
Many people could care less about Web 2.0 and others have been know to use it as a marketing hype. What is Web 2.0;according to Wikipedia it is:
�O’Reilly Media coined the phrase Web 2.0 in 2004 to refer to a supposed second-generation of Internet-based services that let people collaborate and share information online in perceived new ways � such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies. O’Reilly Media, in collaboration with MediaLive International, used the phrase as a title for a series of conferences and since then it has become a popular, if ill-defined and often criticized, buzzword amongst the technical and marketing communities.�
Blogging is probably one of the�better known applications of Web 2.0. If you would like a more in depth definition of Web 2.0 here is a link to Tim O�Reilly’s article on What is Web 2.0 .
Below are the websites from the article in the San Francisco Chronicle that they feel exhibit Web 2.0 technologies. This list would not be complete if I did not mention the social websites such as mySpace and YouTube. My son (14 years old)�prefers Gaia to mySpace which is a “community roleplaying site with anime, manga, and video game discussions as well as a links database and a fan-art gallery”. As you will see from the list below there is something for everyone.
| Name | � | What is it? |
|---|---|---|
| Sites marked with an * are based in the San Francisco Bay Area | ||
| StumbleUpon* | � | A free, downloadable browser button that lets people rate and recommend random Web sites to their friends as they “stumble” around the Internet. |
| Imeem* | � | Users participate by joining online communities, called meems, or creating private meems where they can share music, video, photos, comments and blogs with their friends. It also rolls in instant messaging. |
| Slide* | � | It’s a toolbar that sits on your desktop as photos slide by, fed from whatever site you fancy — whether it’s your friends’ Flickr feeds, or things you want to buy on eBay. |
| Meebo* | � | Instead of downloading popular instant messaging services such as Yahoo Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger, Meebo lets you access your buddy list and IM all you want from its Web site. |
| popURLs | � | Popurls aggregates content from the Web’s most popular social sites, so you can see in one fell swoop the hottest stories from Digg, the most popular photos from Flickr, the latest bookmarks on Del.icio.us, the most watched videos from YouTube, and other sites. |
| Dabble* | � | A TV Guide for Internet video, the site lets users tag and rate clips found throughout the Web. Viewers form communities based on their interests, helping sort the Web’s top videos on such topics as baking a dessert and Japanese animation. |
| Pandora* | � | Your personal Internet radio station. |
| Twitter* | � | A text messaging service that lets people send notes to groups. “You can send something to one number and it’s distributed to other people,” said Ryan Freitas, an interaction designer at Adaptive Path in San Francisco. “It tells people where you are. It’s kind of like microblogging. It’s really a lot of fun. Part of Web 2.0 is that it’s fun and it’s a utility combined with one another, so people enjoy what they’re doing while they’re getting something out of it.” |
| Eyespot | � | Upload your video to Eyespot and use its tools to edit it and publish it on other sites. |
| Songbird* | � | Download Songbird to play music from a host of sources. |
| Revver | � | Revver helped make the “Mentos guys” $30,000 in shared advertising revenues and made them famous to boot. Now the Mentos guys have gotten an infusion of Mentos from the candymaker for future Mentos and Coke experiments. Oh, and Revver has attracted more viewers. |
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