It's all about the people...

I know that Web 2.o has been there for a while, I mean Wikis have been around since 1995 now, but i decided to talk about it becuase until now, I feel people dont really understand its significance. Web 2.0 have brought communication and media to a whole new level...

- Web 2.0 has numerous definitions. Tim O'Reilly regards Web 2.0 as business embracing the web as a platform and using its strengths (global audiences, for example). O'Reilly considers that Eric Schmidt's abridged slogan, don't fight the Internet, encompasses the essence of Web 2.0 — building applications and services around the unique features of the Internet, as opposed to building applications and expecting the Internet to suit as a platform (effectively "fighting the Internet").
Web 2.0 websites allow users to do more than just retrieve information. They can build on the interactive facilities of "Web 1.0" to provide "Network as platform" computing, allowing users to run software-applications entirely through a browser. Users can own the data on a Web 2.0 site and exercise control over that data.
W: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2#Characteristics

Web 2.0 services are sometimes defined as web activities that get more valuable the more people use them.
It turned out that alot of executives use Web 2.0 in their daily life.

• LinkedIn

This is probably the easiest Web 2.0 tool to integrate into your day-to-day operations, because it's built around the business résumé. To get going, you just enter your curriculum vitae, search for the names of people you know and trust, and invite them to "connect" to you.

• Facebook

We all know facebook... Forrester (FORR) CEO George Colony thinks every marketer should be using Facebook, if only to see what its 67 million members are up to.

• Twitter

A relative of the IM (instant message) and diminutive cousin of the blog, Twitter is a free service that encourages members to broadcast moment-to-moment updates of what they're doing or thinking in 140 characters or less.
Blip.tv, a New York-based Internet video startup, uses Twitter to eavesdrop on its customers. In January it started hearing complaints there about one part of its service, a problem it quickly corrected.

• Dopplr

It is used for sharing travel itineraries.
J.P. Rangaswami a managing director at BT has become a heavy user of this tool. Before Dopplr, which launched last December, it took repeated e-mails to keep contacts informed of his whereabouts. Now his 140 Dopplr contacts know where he is at any moment.
Also, Jigsaw invites you to upload and publish your collection of business cards. At Jobscore you and other executives can swap the résumés of job candidates you don't hire and so on...
W:http://money.cnn.com/2008/03/19/technology/web2.0_goofing.fortune/index.htm


Web 2.0 Summit focuses on emerging business and technology developments that utilize the Web as a platform and defines how the Web will drive business in the future.
As important though, is the tangible value which the Web 2.0 provides today:
- Leveraging The Long Tail. Amazon and eBay used this idea to build companies worth billions and billions. This is how. Web 2.0 provides both the audience and the services.
- Small Pieces, Loosely Joined. Monolithism is dead, we can't build big stuff like that any more. It's not agile nor can what you build be aggregated, deliver sustained value, or even survive for long.
- Self-Service and Participation. Fostering this lets you capture new value in your Web 2.0 apps 24 hours a day. Examples: Tagging, ranking, trackbacks, reputations.
- Radical Decentralization. Single sources of function are single sources of failure and are unacceptable now. And they don't scale to either deliver or capture significant value.
- Emergent Behavior. Your Web 2.0 functionality can be reused, remixed, aggregated, and syndicated and the resulting value reintegrated back into your application.

Web 2.0 thrives on another cool technology called RSS. As many of you already know, RSS allows users to get automatic updates when a site changes instead of checking it all the time to get the latest information. One simply subscribes to the site’s RSS feed, and as content changes the information is automatically delivered to your RSS reader or aggregator.
With Web 2.0 RSS kicks in the turbo and becomes widely used to syndicate, filter and re-mix news, articles and other types of content into new information items.

Some great examples of this Web 2.0 approach include:

Andale.com, a site that analyzes sales information from eBay and provides it to users so they can best take advantage of the auction site. Another is HousingMaps.com, a site powered by Craigslist.org and Google Maps, but not officially affiliated with either.

We also have http://www.blogger.com/ which bloggers like myself are its source of information and usage, In addition, there is http://www.youtube.com/ and which people's videos are its whole content, http://www.secondlife.com/...

Tim Bray writes:
More immediately, Web 2.0 is the era when people have come to realize that it's not the software that enables the web that matters so much as the services that are delivered over the web. Web 1.0 was the era when people could think that Netscape (a software company) was the contender for the computer industry crown; Web 2.0 is the era when people are recognizing that leadership in the computer industry has passed from traditional software companies to a new kind of internet service company. The net has replaced the PC as the platform that matters, just as the PC replaced the mainframe and minicomputer.

More to come is Web 3.0! It's all about being connected now...

Jana:)