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In the years that have passed since the invention of Internet, few terms have been as controversial as Web 2.0 is today. Days after Tim O’Reilly coined the term, the IT community was already split between those who thought Web 2.0 is a new trend, those who thought that Web 2.0 is just a fancy name, those who thought that there is no such thing as Web 2.0 and those who thought that O’Reilly was just trying to milk some more money.

The leaders of the Internet community are still debating what Web 2.0 is and what Web 2.0 is not. But, regardless of the opinions towards Web 2.0 itself, everyone agrees that a very serious change has occurred in the way we think about WWW.

In this article, we will discuss about this radical change. We will also talk about how this has influenced the way marketing is done on the WWW, and some of the distinct characteristics of Web 2.0 as a marketplace.

The World Wide Web hasn’t been around forever. In fact, there was a time when we had Internet, but no WWW. I won’t bore you with the details about how Sir Timothy Berners-Lee invented the WWW – the essence is that the Internet has not been built with web browsers in mind.

Initially, web pages were extremely limited. In its earliest versions, the web pages only had very limited support for images, and even in the late 1990s there were still users who preferred not to see any pictures online. The web was used almost exclusively by tech fans, with only a few notable exceptions.

Web pages were essentially analogous to a page in a book (this is basically where the term web page came from). The content was static and the reader was passive – he was only the one reading (or otherwise receiving) the information contained in a web page. And, why not admit, web pages were so boring that any sane person is still wondering about how the hell we ended up with the dot-com fiasco.

How did this change?

In the late 1990s, when the Windows platform had already gotten a wide adoption on the desktop market, and most desktop computers were using Intel or AMD processors, a veritable “hardware race” began. Computers quickly became faster and faster, and fast Internet connections became cheaper. Although the sheer power of hardware exceeded most people’s demands, the gap was quickly filled with more demanding applications.

This also made it possible for web browsers to become more and more powerful, and several new standards began to appear. CSS became the de-facto standard for advanced formatting of web pages. JavaScript began to be used for more and more complex tasks, and new concepts, like the semantic web, began gathering adepts.

In the end, most people’s concept over how the WWW should look was completely changed:

• Web pages were no longer static. The content was not pre-defined, but personalized according to what every user wanted.

• Web pages no longer displayed only text and static images – but also more complex media, to the point where they became completely interactive.

• Web pages were no longer organized only with links, but also according to elements like tags.

• The users of web pages were no longer reading the page and leaving – they were interacting.

• The content of a page was no longer the sole property of the one who had written it – a lot of web sites allowed other people to edit them (a concept known as wiki).

All these changes, and many others, gave Tim O’Reilly the idea of the Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is a term we use to define all these radical changes that have occurred in the World Wide Web.

By Chris Freville

Chris Freville is the author of the highly useful book on how to unleash traffic using the power of Web 2.0. For more information visit web 2.0 traffic

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