What in the World is Web 2.0?
Okay, so I’ve heard the term “Web 2.0″ several times… and I’ve heard about blogs, about MySpace.com, about how Google works, and all that - but never quite connected what they had to do with each other until last week.
I was at Interop in New York, when I stumbled in on a presentation being given by the Editor-in-Chief of the Web 2.0 Journal, Dion Hinchcliffe on Web 2.0 entitled Applying Web 2.0: Early Notes from the Field.
The speaker quoted Tim O’Reilly in his presentation giving the short definition of Web 2.0: “Networked applications that explicitly leverage network effects.” A network effect creates value by having a better product the more people that use it. He gave examples such as MySpace, YouTube, Digg, and eBay where content is created by users, as well as a search engine like Google or it’s gmail that gets smarter as people use it.
I hope to blog more about this in the future, but until then, here’s a side-bar I ran across in the most recent edition of Information Week entitled “The Skinny on Web 2.0″.