Web2.0

"Steve, what's the next hot online community?" It seems as though everybody is on the lookout for the successor to MySpace, Twitter or Facebook. Nobody, even in a difficult economic climate, wants to be viewed as a latecomer. Perhaps as a defense mechanism to avoid being wrong myself, I now give a boilerplate answer that I believe can last. In short, the next big community is not a single destination. Rather, it is going to be everywhere. To paraphrase Forrester analyst Charlene Li, social networking is becoming "like air."

The problem, however, is that this model can't scale. Tastes change and people are always migrating to trendier sites-especially as their friends do. As a result, the Internet amber is littered with fossilized communities that once dominated. These former stalwarts include AOL, Angelfire, TheGlobe.com, GeoCities and Tripod.

Community today is a different animal. People now expect it to be part of virtually every online experience. Most media companies now allow users to leave comments or even create profiles. Hundreds of thousands of brands, NGOs and individuals have set up their own social networks on Ning.com. The entire web is going social.

Everyone is doing it Wrong answer. Look, do not get social media confused with social networks such as Facebook or social news sites such as Digg. Social media is essentially a platform for communication. Whatever the technology, or means, communication is the outcome. Every company can benefit from communicating a valuable message. Although many companies dabble in social media, a large percentage are simple wasting their time. You must know what you want to achieve from social media to form a good strategy to achieve it.

Pervasive The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.- Mark Weiser

In our initial brainstorming, we formulated our sense of Web 2.0 by example: Web 1.0   Web 2.0 DoubleClick --> Google AdSense Ofoto --> Flickr Akamai --> BitTorrent mp3.com --> Napster Britannica Online --> Wikipedia personal websites --> blogging evite --> upcoming.org and EVDB domain name speculation --> search engine optimization page views --> cost per click screen scraping --> web services publishing --> participation content management systems --> wikis directories (taxonomy) --> tagging ("folksonomy") stickiness --> syndication

1. The Web As Platform Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn't have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core. You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core.