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What is WEB 2.0 and should I be interested?

August 2007

This month's topic is about the buzz around WEB2.0, what it means, should you be excited by it, how to embrace it and finally whether your website is WEB2.0 ready?

It's everywhere, you can't read newspaper without coming across the buzz word of WEB 2.0 and another company being bought or funded in this area. Myspace, Facebook, Plaxo, Twitter just to name a few of the WEB2.0 companies that are setting the world on fire, but what does it all mean?

Well one of the good definitions of WEB2.0 is:

… a term often applied to a perceived ongoing transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of websites to a full-fledged computing platform serving Web applications to end users. Ultimately WEB 2.0 services are expected to replace desktop computing applications for many purposes.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WEB_2.0

What does this mean though?

Well think about how you manage your website with Sliced Bread, you don't have any software downloaded on your actual computer, it all runs on the Web server. So if you are using Sliced Bread to manage your website you are already part of the WEB2.0 explosion.

But that's a really simplistic view of WEB2.0 and the benefit it can provide.

It's about users interacting with you, or your business and collaborating with each other through your website or other technology. Giving the user the power and control in that interaction creating what Paul Graham calls a democracy on the WEB.

The web is a medium that can offer much more than simple retrieval of information or content, it can allow your users to build communities, ask questions, share ideas all through a technology that can include your website.

The concept of WEB2.0 is certainly not new, it's just a buzzword that's been coined to try and categorise the growth in things like Social Networking and interactivity of the web. With the buzz and promise surrounding technologies such as AJAX Flex, Ruby on Rails etc, websites are fast becoming much more like real fully fledged applications. People are no longer noticing that the websites they use on a daily basis are in fact “WEB 2.0 Applications".

Should you be interested?

Yes! You should be doing all that you can to embrace these concepts on your website and how it has a two way interaction with your users. Most website have some level of interactivity and for a lot of businesses that's fine for their own website, but you need to think out of the box on this one too!

Some of the ways you can be more interactive with your customers online are:

  • Contact Forms
  • Online Forums
  • Members Areas
  • Aggregating Content (Sharing Content with other website and technologies)
  • Mashing Up Content (things like including a Google map of your office)

Conclusion

WEB2.0 is not rocket science, it's not really even particularly new. It is however a reminder that we need to fin innovative ways to interact and give our customers more power in their relationships with our business.

Sources

WEB 2.0 http://www.paulgraham.com/WEB20.html
Wikipedia WEB 2.0 - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WEB_2.0

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