What is Web 2.0?

by August 8, 2005

In preparation for tomorrow’s Are you ready for Web 2.0? BAYCHI event, I thought it would be useful to pull together some recent perspectives on what Web 2.0 means.

“Web 2.0 is different. It’s about AWS (Amazon Web Services). It’s not on the web site for users to see. It’s about making the internet useful for computers.” –Jeff Bezos, Web 2.0, 2004

“Web 2.0 is all about remixing, not about designing. The best metaphor for web 2.0 is the DJ, not the composer. Web 2.0 is a product of remix culture.” –Jonathan Boutelle

“A vision of the Web in which information is broken up into “microcontent” units that can be distributed over dozens of domains. The Web of documents has morphed into a Web of data. We are no longer just looking to the same old sources for information. Now we’re looking to a new set of tools to aggregate and remix microcontent in new and useful ways.” –Richard MacManus & Joshua Porter, Web 2.0 for Designers

“Web 2.0 is giving up control. It is setting the data free. It is providing services that work with other people’s data. It is about having a valuable resource and making no presumptions about how or where that resource will be used.” –DeWitt Clinton

“At present I see five characteristics of the Web 2.0 infrastructure, or Web 2.0 applications: “The Web As Platform, Point of Presence, Microcontent-based, Second order content, and Semantic Web / Metaweb.” –Mediatope

Whether or not we call it Web 2.0 "I believe that we’re seeing a huge shift right now: to the Era of Interfaces." -Web 2.0 as the Era of Interfaces