Web 2.0 May Have Bigger Implications Than You Think

The changeover from Web 1.0 websites into Web 2.0 has been nothing less than exciting. Everybody is affected by these great new websites, whether they realize it or not. If you do a search for almost any conceivable topic in major search engines like Google nowadays, a Web 2.0 site such as Wikipedia or Squidoo will have some answers in the top 10 results for you.

It's the biggest thing to happen to the internet since email.

So what exactly defines a Web 2.0 site? In a nutshell, a Web 2.0 site is one that the webmaster doesn't create the content for... Its' users add to it, making it a bona fide community.

This implies that all Web 2.0 sites are running some kind of social application, and one hot new trend is for the application to spill over onto other websites & applications, like it does with Social Bookmarking tools like Del.icio.us.

This label can be confusing sometimes since we think of Web 2.0 as a brand new concept, even though some of its' pioneers have been around in the form of directories since the early days of the internet.

Its origins are hotly debated in fact, although nobody can deny that DMOZ, the Open-source directory is one of the first Web 2.0 applications, at least in their original vision.

The flaw in DMOZ's design, mainly that so few editors are willing to keep up to pace with so many submissions, is the chief reason that it took so long for other Web 2.0 applications to appear.

Nobody figured we'd do all that work.

Now websites like Del.icio.us, YouTube, & MySpace have us all jumping over each other to go and add content to someone else's website, while they make all the Advertising revenue off of us.

That has started to change too, as Squidoo and some other Web 2.0 sites are starting to actually share their Ad revenue with the content producers as well. It has indeed been getting interesting lately.

The social website trend has grown enormously, and there's no end in sight. Quite the contrary, we're on the start of a major boom in Web 2.0 applications, as the technology curve has just been flattened.