Dragonfly Media Curacao

A question that comes up once in a while, or more accurately; many times in a while, is “What is Web 2.0?”. This term is a typical ‘buzzterm’ in that it was coined as a serious means of describing an evolutional phenomenon, but sounded so good that the marketeers started using it and in no time the world is ‘a-buzz’ with Web 2.0 and hardly anyone knows what it means anymore. Instead of repeating the same story verbally a dozen times, we will try to explain it here.

First off; there are basically two definitions of Web 2.0. The first definition is the official (a.k.a. professional’s) view on Web 2.0. The second definition is the unofficial (a.k.a. gifted amateur’s and the public at large’s) view on Web 2.0. The first goes way beyond the scope of this post and we’re sure that if we explain it from this point of view we will lose 75% of the readers just about…….. here. So, we will explain the unofficial view on Web 2.0 which has most of the goodies of the official view, but less difficult words. If you are interested in the professional side of things, you can read this excellent article at oreillynet.com.

If there is a Web 2.0 there also has to be a Web 1.0. If you want to put it in a timeline you can say that Web 1.0 marks the period before and slightly after the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2001. The term Web 2.0 has gained credibility since, roughly, 2004 and it is growing stronger by the day. There is one major flaw though in trying to capture Web 2.0 in a timeline because today many of the (internet) companies can still be considered Web 1.0, especially here on Curacao. The reason for this is that Web 2.0 is a concept, a set of principles, which a company can use to gain leverage in an ever-growing market and, when used openly and wisely, can give that company access to a snowballing amount of customers and data. So much for the marketing talk, let’s look at what Web 2.0 consists of.

Roughly, you can identify the following principles in Web 2.0:

• The web is a platform
  In the old days companies would develop software. This software was dependent on an operating system (Windows software does not work on Apple), had to be distributed through normal channels and a customer would have to go to a store to buy the product and install it on his/her computer. If you look at applications like Google, Gmail, Youtube and other webbased software you will see that it is platform independent, you don’t need to install anything on your computer and you can access it from everywhere. This is one part of Web 2.0; the internet itself is the platform.
  You can easily see where the benefits are for the consumer, but there are even greater benefits for the company that builds the software. 1) They can make changes whenever they are necessary, nobody needs to buy or download the latest version because everything happens in the background. 2) There is no need to distribute the information besides uploading the changes to the server. 3) They don’t have to make separate releases for different platforms. And the list goes on.
• Harness collective intelligence
  Right now there are many people that are adding to the content of the web, making the internet grow with every keystroke. All these single users are participating in social on-line networks, posting articles and comments to blogs, adding to their homepages and are creating a wealth of information. Companies like Google and Yahoo harness all this information by sending their spiders and websites like Youtube, Flickr and del.icio.us thrive on active participation of people to grow. The more websites they spider or the more users they have, the more powerful and interesting they become because they ‘control’ a greater share of the collective intelligence.
  A central concept within the power of the collective intelligence is the concept of the long tail. It is a fact that most of the internet is made up of a lot of small sites. The large sites (the head) with all their content make up a part of all the content on-line, but by far the largest part of on-line content is contained within small websites (the long tail) . If you can harness those sites you harness the largest part of the internet.
• Data /content is what matters
  If all this information is available on-line for free (much like this blog and this post) doesn’t that adversely affect the value of data? The answer to this is yes and no. Yes, data as such becomes cheaper because if you can find all this information about the backbone of the internet on-line for free, why would you buy a book about it? And no, data that needs an investment (in time or money) becomes worth more because there are more educated people around that are interested.
  Furthermore, when there is a centralized datasource and multiple websites tap from that datasource the data itself becomes worth less. However, if you tap from a datasource and enhance it, you make it your own and add value to the core data. The original date plus your additions then become worth a lot more. Now imagine combining this concept with the previous one and you will see that when you use the collective intelligence to, for instance, add information about a location to a map; the amount of possibilities can sky rocket. A result could be maps.google.com.
• Make data re-usable
  With the first layout languages for the internet presentation and content were combined. An HTML-page is a mix of content and ‘HTML-tags’ which define layout and presentation. As the language grew into dHTML other languages were being combined with HTML to add functionality (JavaScript) and to separate content from layout (CSS). Throw a database and a server-side scripting language (PHP/ASP) into this mix and you can have a true separation of content and presentation. The Web 1.0 way of looking at this separation was to say that it is useful to separate them because if you want to change one you don’t have to bother with the other. This would be a valid point.
  The Web 2.0 of looking at the separation of content and presentation would be to be able to re-use the data somewhere else or to sell it to someone else. A good example of this is RSS (Really Simple Syndication, also called an RSS feed or webfeed) which is basically a text-file that can be summoned by an application and then processed. Such RSS feeds enable information to move through the internet at lightning speeds and it doesn’t matter which platform you are using (Windows, Mac, PDA, etc) because it is just text. In the end it helps people to stay on top of things and it allows for greater freedom of data.
• Create usability / rich user experience
  The rise of Windows as an operating system is largely due to its intuitive interface (next to creative and agressive marketing). Not many people knew how to work with the text-based interface of DOS, nor wanted to learn how to use it. Windows changed all this with its graphical interface. If you see the web as a platform then you should also create means for people to interact with it. Hence the rise of AJAX. AJAX is a combination of several languages/methods which allow the developer to create interfaces like your standard MS Office applications with intuitive means like drag&drop and ‘on-the-fly’ database access. This increase in usability will ultimately make it easier and more rewarding for people to work with the internet and defeat the boundaries that exist between nerd and user.

As you can see above all these separate concepts of Web 2.0 are part of this bigger picture and enhance each other. You can not see the web as a platform if people are not using it. It takes too much time and effort to export data across the internet and into people’s homes if they need to go out and buy an upgrade to their software every two weeks. And above all; if you want people to contribute you need to empower them, not keep them down.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 14th, 2007 at 8:57 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.