In the past year, we have all seen the Web transform into a collaborative space with immense functionality. The idea of creating rich documents online, sharing it with friends and colleagues, publishing it and accessing it from anywhere in the world was once a dream is now a requirement. There has been a tremendous hoopla about the new Web 2.0. There are a large number of definitions available on the Internet regards the new semantic web or the read/write web; as it is also commonly called, but at its core Web 2.0 is a Marketing Concept. Let me explain…Web 2.0: The NEO Binaries way.
Every industry has its evolutionary stages and so does the IT industry. In the emerging phases of the Web in 1994, the Dot Com boom as it is now known; people felt that reaching the masses was easy and quick as a thought. Everyone was working towards a world shrunk by communication technology to a village. It was believed that the world is going to become smaller; a large community of people who would share ideas. In the process a few enthusiastic entrepreneurs concluded that there is a whole lot of money to be made and everyone joined the band wagon. The gold rush to the Internet spawned numerous companies. Funding houses were galore and everyone who had some kind of service to provide wanted to get online. There were many fake companies that started and most of them released IPOs.
In 2001, the Dot Com bubble burst. Venture Capitalists disappeared and so did the startups. The IT industry went down along with the stock market.
Looking back, there are a lot of reasons for the downfall. There are certain forces that rule a change in the society and unless all of them are in line, a crash is inevitable. According to me, the forces in this case were the lack of technology and the infrastructure, an immature market and weak business models. Neither the technology nor the infrastructure was present to support the tall claims of being able to provide an online office for example. At the same time the users were not completely ready to bite into concepts like buying online and storing information online. And the entrepreneurs had gotten excited and started businesses without strong business models. The result; the bubble burst.
The aftermath of the Dot Com boom and the bust left most of the key players all shaken. The next few years were spent recuperating trying to overhaul themselves and in the mean time came Google, the next big player. Google is one of the key innovators and leaders in the web technology domain. The relevancy of Google adverts has made advertising cheaper and more effective on the internet than on any other media ever before. Gmail according to me is the first comprehensive email system that was built for the Web. You would argue saying there were web email systems earlier, of course - Hotmail has been around for as long as we know the internet; for example. But unlike those earlier services, Gmail’s functionality is a class apart. The conversation view, tags/labels and a search combine to make it a killer app. Google, has given to the world, what the technologists dreamed and promised during the web 1.0, if I am permitted to term it that :)
The new Web has no direct implication to design or technology whatsoever. Things have been progressing in a pretty linear fashion, technology wise. What is now marked as Web 2.0 technology is not new at all, plain javascript, glorified. Suddenly the sites riding the web 2.0 bandwagon have a unique look and feel. Big Fonts. Rounded edges. Fresh colors. This had to be done to clear up the negative image that the Dot Com concept created, some issues had to be eliminated (such as content and feature clutter, complex interfaces, slow pageloads etc.). This is co-incidental as this new marketing concept called web 2.0 comes at a time when websites / web systems have evolved to a point where they try to focus on simplicity and functionality that the grandmothers can use as opposed to complex, feature-full systems of the old days.
The crash left a very negative image of the Dot Com concept in the minds of the people and left them slightly terrified of technology. To eliminate any such ill feeling, the new term Web 2.0 has come into existence, a plain Marketing Concept.