Web 2.0 and Social Technology

Kunal has helped several startups in the Web 2.0 and Social Networking space in various stages of their companies. These include a traditional social network play, a educational social network play, a twitter like play in the Investor Relations space, a Web 2.0 play that combines Evite and Twitter ... and several others....

As per Wikipedia, in 1997, the Web 1.0 (or the read-mostly) web had about 250,000 websites with about 45 million global users. The estimate in 2006, with Web 2.0 this number has dramatically changed to 80,000,000 websites with 1+ billion users. This is now the read-write Web. The Web is no longer a one way communication from a select few to the masses. Rather, everyone has a web presence is in actively contributing to the content on the web in terms of blogging, tagging, reviewing, uploading videos, sharing bookmarks and so on. People demand to be heard on the World Wide Web.

Web 2.0 is not just another buzz word. Now we are hearing Web 3.0. What is all the fuss about -like the fuss on SOA a few years back. Back in 2005, Tim O'Rielly wrote a great article explaining what Web 2.0 is believed to be. The diagram below is from this article. Tim can quiet easily be attributed to the invention of this word.

As usual, any great article spurs debates. You can probably search the internet for tons of people who disagree with Tim's definition and explanation of Web 2.0. And at the rate that the Web is changing, and we are changing our lingo, who knows when we will start talking about Web 4.0. Scary thought to me personally. I believe, we as IT professionals have a limited handle on Web 2.0 - let alone 3.0 and Web 4.0.

So what does Web 2.0 mean for you?

Web 2.0 to me is the set of tools that allows you to collaborate effectively, efficiently and for "free". There are very few business models revolving around social networking or social media that can charge their users money - for example: Facebook would not be facebook if they charged a fee for their service. That is the difference between the blockbusters and the other players in this space. The User Generated Content (UGC) is a classic example. There were at one time over a 100 video sharing sites - which ones made it and which ones did not?