What Are The Major Differences Between Web 1.0 And Web 2.0?

By Article Specialist

You witnessed, were a victim of, or have at least heard about the bursting of the dot com bubble in the fall of 2001. Fortunes that had been made overnight were lost overnight.

The sky was falling. It was a very scary time for a lot of people. Some said that the World Wide Web was just a flash-in-the-pan idea that had been over-hyped and that the crash was irrefutable proof of that fact.

There were, however, some survivors of the 2001 dot com bust. The survivors had a few important commonalities and there were those who insisted that the World Wide Web was more important than ever and had a very bright future indeed.

One of those who saw the results of the 2001 dot com bust as a ‘glass half full’ rather than a ‘glass half empty’ was a man by the name of Tim O’Reilly. O’Reilly (of O’Reilly Media) met with Dale Dougherty of Media Live International in 2004. Out of that meeting the term ‘Web 2.0’ was born.

The definition that Tim O’Reilly gives for Web 2.0 is: "Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.

Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them."

Web 2.0 can be viewed as an upgrade to the World Wide Web. It is still the web but it is a new and improved version of the web.

New technologies such as blogs, social bookmarking, wikis, podcasts and RSS feeds are just a few of the technologies that are helping to shape and direct Web 2.0.

The Web before the dot com crash is often referred to as Web 1.0 now but only since the coining of the term Web 2.0.

Some of the more obvious differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 are: DoubleClick replaced by Google AdSense, Britannica Online replaced by Wikipedia, Personal Web Pages replaced by Blogs, Content Management Systems replaced by Wikis and Directories replaced by Tagging.

These are only a very few of the differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 but they are major ones.

You will notice, if you look carefully that the commonality of many of the differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is that Web 1.0 was driven and controlled by the ‘powers-that-be’ and Web 2.0 is driven by users.

That is a huge difference and the one that is making Web 2.0 more and more user friendly not to mention more and more profitable for just average people. You might even call it a power shift of seismic proportions.

Once the websites that could be accessed on the Internet were built and controlled by only a few and were certainly not ‘interactive’ but today anybody with an idea, a few dollars and just a little know-how can build a Web 2.0 website that is completely interactive and turn it into a money-making enterprise if they choose to.

The technology is there. It is easy to use. It is accessible and it is relatively cheap… some of it is even free.

Many websites that started out as static websites are now adding features like blogs and forums and propelling themselves into the future of Internet commerce. Those websites who continue be ‘old hat’ are falling further and further behind.

Just regular people now expect to be able to ask questions and get answers from websites and they expect websites to be at least somewhat interactive. The Internet has always been and still is a platform for information, but with Web 2.0 has also become a platform for participation.

Related Article:
What is Web 2.0?