The dotcom crash taught us something, even if we vehemently deny it. After the dotcom crash dust had settled the only writing on the wall was: ‘It is all about the user’. No matter what you want to gain from your website, or the web, you have to realize that you need to take care of the people who come to your website; your website’s users. This is the golden rule of the internet. Try as you may, you can never change the intrinsic nature of the internet. And try they did: the rapid monetization of the internet and the www in particular was in complete disregard for what the internet was supposed to stand for. As we all know, this approach failed as it led to the dotcom crash.
Wikipedia defines web 2.0 as ‘a supposed 2nd generation of internet based services such as social networking, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies that let people collaborate and share information online in previously unavailable ways’.
Coined by Oreilly media in 2004, web 2.0 was initially just another marketing buzzword meant to entice, enchant and pull out the money men (read venture capitalists) from their post-dotcom-crash bunkers. However, web 2.0 has come to mean something, as Paul graham points out. Web 2.0 simply means using the internet the way it was supposed to be used in the first place. I’m not too sure it’s a good thing to have a phrase describing what the web should be, but that’s just me.
[…] on just those who made it big during the first dot-com boom or those who are profiting from Web 2.0, Jessica (the author) also includes some of the true pioneers in the field. She recognizes that, […]