Web 2.0 & the New Consumer

Web 2.0 is a term describing the trend in the use of the World Wide Web and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing and, most notably, collaboration among users. These concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services such as social-networking sites, wikis and blogs. The term became notable after the first O'reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but to a change in the way end users use the Web.

The new way consumers are interacting with each other through the internet allows companies to activly hook in to word of mouth marketing in a powerfull way. This is done via social networking, blogs, podcasts, RRS feeding (and other forms of many-to-many publishing).

In the opening talk of the first Web 2.0 conference, O'Reilly and John Battelle summarized what they saw as the themes of Web 2.0. They argued that the web had become a platform, with software above the level of a single device, leveraging the power of the "Long Tail", and with data as a driving force.

O'Reilly provided examples of companies or products that embody these principles in his description of his four levels in the hierarchy of Web 2.0-ness:

Level-3 applications, the most "Web 2.0"-oriented, only exist on the Internet, deriving their effectiveness from the inter-human connections and from the network effects that Web 2.0 makes possible, and growing in effectiveness in proportion as people make more use of them. O'Reilly gave as examples: eBay, Craigslist, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Skype, dodgeball and AdSence.

Level-2 applications can operate offline but gain advantages from going online. O'Reilly cited Flickr, which benefits from its shared photo-database and from its community-generated tag database.

Level-1 applications operate offline but gain features online. O'Reilly pointed to Writely (now Google Docs & Spredsheets) and I Tunes (because of its music-store portion).

Level-0 applications work as well offline as online. O'Reilly gave the examples of MapQuest, Yahoo! Local and Google Maps (mapping-applications using contributions from users to advantage could rank as "level 2").

Non-web applications like e-mail, Instant messaging clients and the telaphone fall outside the above hierarchy.

The idea of "Web 2.0" can also relate to a transition of some websites from isolated infomation silosto to interlinked computing platforms that function like locally-available software in the perception of the user. Web 2.0 also includes a social element where users generate and distribute content, often with freedom to share and re-use. This can result in a rise in the economic value of the web to businesses, as users can perform more activities online. Others have provided additional definitions of Web 2.0:

“…the philosophy of mutually maximizing collective intelligence and added value for each participant by formalized and dynamic information sharing and creation.”

"…all those Internet utilities and services sustained in a data base which can be modified by users whether in its content (adding, changing or deleting- information or associating metadates with the existing information) how to display them or in content and external aspect simultaneously”.

Web 2.0 Characteristics

The characteristics of Web 2.0 are:

• Rich user experience
• Social networking
• User participation (Upload and share photos, videos, content etc.)
• Dynamic content
• Metadata
• Web standards and scalability
• Cascading Style Sheets to aid in the separation of presentation and content
• Folksonomies (collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging)
• Three further characteristics that are associated with web 2.0: openness, freedom and collective intelligence by way of user participation

Technology overview
The sometimes complex and continually evolving technology infrastructure of Web 2.0 includes server-software, content-syndication, messaging-protocols, standards-oriented browsers with plug-ins and extensions, and various client-applications. The differing, yet complementary approaches of such elements provide Web 2.0 sites with infomation storage, creation, and dissemination challenges and capabilities that go beyond what the public formerly expected in the environment of the so-called "Web 1.0".