Is It Web 2.0 - And For How Long?
We seem to be in the midst of it now, Web 2.0 that is. Is it panning out to be what everyone said it would be? Here’s a quote from a Businessweek article written in late 2005:
“The Web isn’t so much a place anymore,” explains Ross Mayfield, CEO of Palo Alto (Calif.)-based startup Socialtext Inc., which offers services to create collaborative Web sites called wikis. It’s more of a doorway into services, from the user-written reference site Wikipedia to the community organizing service Meetup to the folksy classifieds site Craigslist. As Mayfield noted in a recent blog post, “They Google (GOOG ), Flickr, blog, contribute to Wikipedia, Socialtext it, Meetup, post, subscribe, feed, annotate, and above all share. In other words, the Web is increasingly less about places and other nouns, but verbs.”
Well according to that quote, and many others like it, they’ve been pretty accurate as to where we’re going with the web. Is it going to last though? Sites keep cropping up with the next “new thing” or improving upon the last big idea until finally the really good stuff gets bought up by Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft.
Everyone is designing for the web and many of us are slapping some Google Adsense on the pages in hopes of scraping together a few buck while we’re at it (feel free to click the ads here by the way ;). But what does it all mean for the future of the web and Web 2.0? I personally like the way things are developing and I don’t believe it’s going anywhere. But is it going somewhere?
