Although Tim-Berners Lee called the term ‘Web 2.0’ a piece of jargon that found prominence in 2004, thanks to the attention drawn by the O’Reilly Web Conference, one must say that the internet and what is has to offer has changed drastically.
Prior to this, the internet was largely used to get text and photos with very limited or no interactive opportunities available. However, all that has changed now, as the focus has shifted to creating a ‘rich experience’ for the user, so much so that they continue to use the internet in exploring the opportunities and enjoying information in the form of multimedia that is made freely available. Indeed, the internet connection has become more of a need than just a want amongst millions of its users in the world today.
Technologies such as CSS 2.0, XHTML, ,Ajax and Flex among others have ensured that the crossover is complete into a phase where information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design and collaboration have become an everyday reality through the existence of web-based communities, web applications, social-networking sites, folksonomies, blogs, mashups, wikis, hosted services and video sharing sites.
Even mentioning the word blogging would be obvious because it pertains to a large part of information sharing through print, but the truth is that it has changed the way people look for written information on various topics. One can share art and photography using sites such as Flickr, Photobucket and Picasa, share audio (music) on sites such as Last.fm and MySpace Music, share videos on sites like Youtube, Viddler, Vimeo and most recently, conduct ‘livecasting’ on Ustream.tv and Justin.tv among many others that are possibly not that well known.
And the reason why this has taken the world by storm is because of its appeal to the masses, which will remain for years to come, not unless we find our future in the hands of Web 3.0…