What Is Web2?

Web2 is one of those terms that came into existence without anyone really knowing what it meant or what it stood for, rather like RSS. It has come to symbolize a growing trend in internet usage and design however that is really quite important and so having an understanding of what is has come to mean today is quite important.

If you go back to when the internet started (which is almost impossible to pinpoint) and the world wide web was invented, creating a website was a fairly specific skill which only a few people possessed and like most skills was a bit of a mystery.

If you were a business or a non-profit and wanted your own website, you had to employ some one to design and built it and maintain it for you, either in house or outsource it.If you wanted to change anything about it, then you had to do the same process. It was often quite expensive and a bit of a black art.

And then along came blogs.At first people saw blogs as a bit of a novelty and something that was quite fun for people to use to publish and keep their own online diaries.

It soon became clear that the real value was in the software itself.Blog software like Moveable Type and WordPress showed that people could build and design and maintain their own websites themselves with little or no technical knowledge.

The web really had become interactive and people were really able to do things for themselves.

And Web 2 was born - not simply out of blogs and blog software, but out of a raft of other types of sites,Facebook, Twitter, Friends reunited, Myspace, Flicr etc. that really let people use the web in a truly interactive sense.

People were able to use the web themselves and effectively communicate with people in away that was dynamic, rather than static, and could genuinely involve people with the content of their site in real time.

Individuals were in control of what they put out there.

These types of sites, all very different in lots of ways had one thing in common - they all became known as Web 2.A term that meant a transition in the way people used the web to communicate with each other, a real evolution of technology in what was already a rapidly evolving technology.

The big question of course, is what is web3 going to bring us?