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A Web 2.0 Primer

By John Wooden
Fredrickson Communications Usability Lead

Web 2.0 delivers 273 million results on Google (today) and has already been the subject of two annual conferences in San Francisco, but if asked, most web users couldn’t define what Web 2.0 is, even if they’ve heard or seen the term before. No surprise—it’s a slippery concept obscured by a certain amount of hype.

The hype, however, doesn’t mean there isn’t something happening worth noticing and trying to understand. Web 2.0 isn’t a thing or a place—it’s an umbrella term to describe rapidly evolving tools and practices that are accelerating various types of decentralization, collaboration, sharing, and social networking. Not all of these tools and practices are completely new—in fact, many of them were used during the Web 1.0 era—but at a certain point in any evolution, a series of incremental changes results in something that is different enough to be noticed and even labeled, and such is the case with Web 2.0.

Interest in Web 2.0 increased following the first conference on the subject in October 2004, organized by O’Reilly Media (best known for its numerous books on topics in information technology). O’Reilly Media VP Dale Dougherty is credited with coming up with the idea to use Web 2.0 as the theme of the conference. Some people have suggested that this concept is or was nothing more than an attempt to market a conference and woo venture capital. Although there is some truth in this, it’s too reductive. So let’s look more closely at what Web 2.0 is (or isn’t) and touch on what some of the implications might be for business.

In “What is Web 2.0? Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software” (arguably the most important article written about Web 2.0 so far), Tim O’Reilly explains that his group’s initial brainstorming sessions about Web 2.0 set out to contrast Web 1.0 sites, practices, and models with those of Web 2.0. Following this lead, we’ll begin by contrasting Wikipedia with Britannica Online …

Wikipedia

Founded by Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia is an excellent example of what Tim O’Reilly calls “harnessing collective intelligence,” a trend that is accelerating with Web 2.0. A blend of “wiki” (an application that allows users to contribute and edit content collaboratively) and “encyclopedia,” Wikipedia is described on its home page as a “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” It is “written collaboratively by many of its readers. Lots of people are constantly improving Wikipedia, making thousands of changes an hour, all of which are recorded on article histories and recent changes. Inappropriate changes are usually removed quickly.”

Wikipedia now consists of more than 10,000 user-created entries. The obvious risk of this approach is that it allows content to be published that is uneven, inconsistent, inaccurate, or heavily biased. However, thousands of readers help to monitor the quality of information on the site, an approach that has been called “self-healing.” Some entries are even preceded by a warning about “weasel words” that betray a particular bias. Wikipedia has thus created a model that is very different from the more conventional, centralized, top-down, and Web 1.0 Britannica Online. In contrast to Britannica Online, Wikipedia exemplifies many of the defining characteristics of Web 2.0:

• Decentralization (dispersion or distribution of functions and powers to end users)

• User collaboration (contributing, monitoring, and editing content)

• Sharing (in this case knowledge-sharing).

BitTorrent

Decentralization, collaboration, and (file) sharing are the essence of peer-to-peer systems. The first mainstream peer-to-peer network was Napster, and its well-publicized legal dispute with the record companies involved the decentralized distribution and sharing of digital music files. With Napster, individual users broke the monopoly on the packaging and distribution of popular music (not unlike the way in which Wikipedia challenges the conventional model of the encyclopedia represented by Britannica).

BitTorrent, another peer-to-peer pioneer, allows users to share music, video, software, and games, but unlike Napster—where one user would have to finish downloading an entire file before other users could request it from her—BitTorrent disperses the file sharing process. Instead of a thousand users all swarming the same server to get the same file, BitTorrent enables all these users to collaborate in the download by dividing files into smaller bits that are then distributed by peers before being assembled again as a complete file. This has the effect of making the most popular files the fastest to download.

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