बावरा मन

Question: When is Web 2.0 Releasing?
Ans: It is already out there, but is in Beta mode.

Ok, the story goes like this, a friend of mine overheard some of his juniors talking about startups, web 2.0, cool web-applications and all, while taking this stroll in the University Campus. Out of curiousity he stayed there for some time, trying to find out what
they were talking about.

Some of them were really going gaga over how the internet is evolving and how everything is adopting this change. Suddenly a poor guy who was all this time trying to understand whats going on, couldnt hold it any longer and asks this innocent question.
“When is web 2.0 releasing ?”.

My friend, listening to this, couldnt control himself and burst into laughter, and left the place as soon as he could without even looking at the reaction of the other guys.

When he told this incident to me, even I couldnt avoid my smile, but I thought probably its the time when I should put my 2 cents for web2.0.

What is web 2.0 ?

Before going forward and answering this question, I would like to quote this quotation from “The Book Of Mozilla”

And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced.
But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird.
The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire
and thunder upon them. For the beast had been
reborn with its strength renewed,
and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.

Ok, I agree that the above quote is very context sensitive, particularly the last line of it, but still best describes the origin of web2.0.

The term Web2.0 got popular with Web2.0 conference, which was started after the infamous Dot Com Bubble Burst (The ashes of web 1.0). It so happened that post this bubble-burst era some of the few remaining companies sat together to discuss, why the bubble burst ? And after some brainstorming they realised that it was not a “burst” as such, but punishment for a basic mistake, of not understaning the behavior of internet properly. These remaining few companies were not the lucky ones, but they shared a pattern, of knowing the behavior of internet more closely than others.
This pattern or the understanding of the web that they shared, lead to the foundation for Web2.0 .

But what is it ?

Again, the answer needs some elaboration and a lot more understanding. A simple answer like its a change from Read Only web to a Read Write Web is not sufficient. Also, if I say that its a move towards making a semantic web, it wont help again. Neither will the statement that its a movement from taxonomical architecture to folksonomical architecture.

Yeah its all of it and still something more. What, I see as of now is that Its basically a process of continuous change based on the knowledge gained from the past experience and current learnings.

I would like to quote Stephen Downes here, who has described this change very well in the following lines.

In a nutshell, what has happened is that the Web has shifted from being a medium, in which information was transmitted and consumed, into being a platform, in which content is created, shared, remixed, repurposed, and passed along. And what people are doing with the Web is not merely reading books, listening to the radio or watching TV, but having a conversation, with a vocabulary consisting not just of words but of images, video, multimedia and whatever they can get their hands on. And this is becoming, and looking like, and behaving like, a network.

Some of the most noticeable technology/trends that web2.0 has brought are.. Tagging of information, Blogging, Syndication of your content, Participation, Wikis, Search engine optimization, web-services, Adsense, podcasting, social networks, social bookmarking, recommendation systems & Ajax.

And, my 10 most favorite web2.0 applications (in that order) are
gMail, WordPress, Flickr, Youtube, Technorati, Delicious, Digg, Google Reader, Wikipedia, & Radio Blog Club.

as I said earlier, Web2.0 is still in Beta, imagine how will it look in future.

Just imagine

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