Web 2.0

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People grow up. Things around us do change with time and
sometimes it is just the meaning of a same thing that takes a
different direction all together. In childhood, I understood it as
spider’s creation. Now being so near to technology the web
has it is own definition or is a new paradigm in itself.
Well, I was talking about Web 2.0 technologies. Last night
reading Apurv’s article on Social networking 2.0, I just thought
to give it a try to write something about technology though
technology has never been my forte.
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What is Web 2.0 ?
Web 2.0 refers to a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services, which aim to facilitate collaboration and sharing between users

Okay !! Then what was web 1.0 ?
Web 1.0 - The World wide web in non - interactive (it will be too harsh to say non) , read only website with single way source of information

So, what has introduced in Web2.0 to make it different from Web1.0?
Obviously, it has to be technologies and as definition suggest it has to give Web features such as:
1. Interactivness
2. Not only read-only websites but enabliing users to write
3. No one way traffic (what it has led to P2P traffic shaping, High upstream speed requirmnets and many more tech changes)

So where we are heading to?
Using internet not as a service to end user but to use it as a platform.

What is present right now in Web2.0 technologies ?

Blogs (short for Web logs) are online journals or diaries hosted on a Web site and often distributed to other sites or readers using RSS (see below).

Collective intelligence refers to any system that attempts to tap the expertise of a group rather than an individual to make decisions. Technologies that contribute to collective intelligence include collaborative publishing and common databases for sharing knowledge.

Mash-ups are aggregations of content from different online sources to create a new service. An example would be a program that pulls apartment listings from one site and displays them on a Google map to show where the apartments are located.

Peer-to-peer networking (sometimes called P2P) is a technique for efficiently sharing files (music, videos, or text) either over the Internet or within a closed set of users. Unlike the traditional method of storing a file on one machine—which can become a bottleneck if many people try to access it at once—P2P distributes files across many machines, often those of the users themselves. Some systems retrieve files by gathering and assembling pieces of them from many machines.

Podcasts are audio or video recordings—a multimedia form of a blog or other content. They are often distributed through an aggregator, such as iTunes.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) allows people to subscribe to online distributions of news, blogs, podcasts, or other information.

Social networking refers to systems that allow members of a specific site to learn about other members’ skills, talents, knowledge, or preferences. Commercial examples orkut and facebook. Some companies use these systems internally to help identify experts.

Web services are software systems that make it easier for different systems to communicate with one another automatically in order to pass information or conduct transactions. For example, a retailer and supplier might use Web services to communicate over the Internet and automatically update each other’s inventory systems.

Wikis, such as Wikipedia, are systems for collaborative publishing. They allow many authors to contribute to an online document or discussion. ( this is my fav he he he)

Now this was all about the technology.

The big question is about business models the web 2.0 follows ?. Ultimately everything boils down to business isn’t it …

The some of the business models I could see in the Web 2.0 are
1. Revenue sharing between The platform provider(orkut, facebook, youtube etc ) and the publisher( one who publish the content on these platforms) model .

This kind of Business model is used in Youtube where the publisher post his video and the revenue is shared between the two.

2. Revenue kept by publisher alone model – ex. The author of the blogs gets the revenue for the ads per click.

3. Revenues kept by platform alone model – ex orkut keeps all the money it gets from advertisement hosted.

4. Revenue defined pay if it helps you model
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So, above was just to enter the gate of web 2.0 world. I will keep my blog posted with all the tech and business updates on web 2.0. And will try to see the best and worst of the different product available.

But i want to leave an open question here is there a way to get another Business model or a technology for web 2.0 ? lets discuss through comments.

P.S. - Check this article for google’s ambition on the web2.0.