Web 2.0

Published by Dev team of TagALLY | Filed under technology

(orginal text comes from http://www.ebizemoney.com/web-20)

Web 2.0 refers to web based systems, processes and technolgies that are fully exploiting the web for the purpose that it was envisioned to fulfill. Online collaboration, streamlined communications- effective information sharing are some of the benefits that web was expected in enabling enterprises’ business processes. With technologies such as RSS, podcasts, wikis, blogging and more, Web 2.0 has truly started to facilitate the move to the eBiz paradigm.

While certain website models have helped in spearheading the web 2.0 phenomenon, these concepts are actively being pursued by mid to large enterprises as well. LinkedIn for example is a site that facilitated social networking at among professionals. Wikipedia technologies allow visitors to post content on one’s website. Enterprises, both large and small are using the inherent concepts of these sites to extend their eBiz operations and processes to make them not just visible and competitive but as an indirect way to boost their revenues as well. The following are some of the technologies that fall under the Web 2.0 umbrella - RSS (Really Simple Syndication) - A technology that allows alerting of your site’s visitors on your company’s news, product amd service updates and other announcements.

Podcasts - Social networking - Organizations can implement social networking technologies to allow forming of communities on their sites to allow for employees as well as customers actively discuss issues.

Blogs - These are online journals that allows one to post updates about themselves. Most successful websites as well as companies, whether run by newbie enterepreneurs or large enterprises actively use blogs to post the happenings of their worlds.

Web 2.0 is about changing your business model to become interactive with the outside world – your users, customers and even your partners and suppliers. Web 2.0 is about empowering users to define their experiences through easy manipulation of applications and data. It is about making workgroups and communities smarter through better organization of information and effective collaboration. Reliance on IT and backend programming is reduced thus empowering users to have more control on applications and data. Social networks are part of the Web 2.0 phenomenon. Social networks include companies such as YouTube, Facebook.com, Wikipedia.org, Orkut.com, and Hi5.com. How important are social networks in the web world? The answer to this question is quite obvious when we look at the Alexa ranking of these websites – See below (Oct 2007 data):

YouTube.com (Rank: 4)

MySpace.com (Rank: 6)

Facebook.com (Rank: 7)

Orkut.com (Rank: 9)

Hi5.com (Rank: 10)

These sites hold the top ranking of all the sites on the web. That alone tells us and tells entrepreneurs tremendously about tapping into these networks.

Web 2.0 is about the new trends where the web generation interacts on weblogs, downloads ringtones, watches online videos, collaborates through instant messaging and mobile devices supporting such messaging and live interaction and socializes on various social networks. The new trend has become so immense that web advertising has surpassed other forms of advertising (radio, tv, etc.) by many folds. The online generation prefers mashups, which is the process of combining and remixing various media and other content in information portals of each user’s preference.