Five Reasons Why Web 2.0 Matters

jg21 writes "Dion Hinchcliffe, who is becoming the closest thing outside of Tim O'Reilly to being a Web.2.0 popularizer and evangelist, has summarized what he considers to be the five major benefits of Web 2.0 best practices. Hinchcliffe singles out the tactical potential of aligning with Web 2.0's increasingly ballistic trajectory: 'You can use the leviathan forces of attention and enthusiasm that are swirling around Web 2.0 these days as a powerful enabler to make something important and exciting happen in your organization.'"

Comments

The chains have been broken

[peterdaly]

Web 1.0 - Documents
Web 1.5 - Documents + Web Applications that pretend to be documents
Web 2.0 - Documents + Web applications acting like the interactive applications they are

Web applications are now free from the "static document" paradigm that previous chained them down. The web is no longer pretending to be static. That's not to say Web 2.0 is "mature" by any means, but the groundwork as certainly been laid.

BTW - There are a bunch of concepts and methods here that truly are revolutionary. The more I use it and understand what it means, the more I think Web 2.0 is not a bad name, and may even be justified.

-Pete

Re:The chains have been broken

[Dadoo]

For the most part, I agree with you. AJAX/Flash/whatever really is stupid on sites that don't need it. However, there are plenty of applications for which web access is really useful, but any sort of a reload - or even touching the mouse - is disasterous.

My company has an application that processes health insurance claims. In the past, we used to install systems at the customer site. Now, we're working toward the goal of having only one system (or cluster), located at our site, that everyone accesses remotely. People can work from anywhere in the world, use less office space, use less gas for commuting, etc., and all you need to use it is a standard web browser. At the moment, we have to install client software on every PC.

Claims entry is done mostly by hand and the people who have been doing it for a while are unbelievably fast, but only because they can enter an entire claim without touching the mouse. If they did have to touch the mouse even once, they'd at least double their entry time. Since our customers can gain or lose millions of dollars a year on that time, it's important.

I think it's applications like these that will benefit most from things like AJAX and Web 2.0, assuming it's not a lot of hype.

Paul Graham

[hobotron]

has a better 'Web 2.0' summary that I prefer. http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html/

Good but will it be adopted

[squoozer]

I like the look of Web 2.0 (from what I have read about it) but I some how doubt we will be using it anytime soon and the reason: M$. Unless they start updating IE on a fairly regular basis Web 2.0 will just never take off. Yeah there will be implimentations of it (probably FF and Opera) but it won't get to got truly mainstream. M$ are playing catch-up with the release of IE7 but I don't see a big driving force for them to then produce an IE8 with Web 2.0 and other new technology. The browser wars are over there just isn't really all that much to fight over any more.

Personally, I'm more interested in Web Forms 2.0 that represents some really needed technology.

Paul Graham on Web 2.0

[putko]

Paul Graham has a new essay on this:

Does "Web 2.0" mean anything? Till recently I thought it didn't, but the truth turns out to be more complicated. Originally, yes, it was meaningless. Now it seems to have acquired a meaning.

He's resistant to buzzwords, so I found this interesting.