[Summary]
The term "web 2.0" was invented in 2004 by Tim O'Reilly, founder
of O'Reilly Media, a publisher of computer books, as a title for a
series of conferences he was organizing. The web 2.0 was based on
community and sharing, with a wealth of websites whose content was
supplied by users, such as blogs, wikis, social networks and
collaborative encyclopedias. Wikipedia, Facebook and Twitter, of
course, but also tens of thousands of others. The web 2.0 may
begin to fulfill the dream of Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the
web in 1990, and wrote in an essay dated April 1998: "The dream
behind the web is of a common information space in which we
communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential:
the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it
personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. ("The
World Wide Web: A very short personal history", available on his
webpage on the W3C website)
***
The term "web 2.0" was invented in 2004 by Tim O'Reilly, founder
of O'Reilly Media, a publisher of computer books, as a title for a
series of conferences he was organizing.
The web 2.0 was based on community and sharing, with a wealth of
websites whose content was supplied by users, such as blogs, wikis,
social networks and collaborative encyclopedias. Wikipedia,
Facebook and Twitter, of course, but also tens of thousands of
others.
The web 2.0 may begin to fulfill the dream of Tim Berners-Lee, who
invented the web in 1990, and wrote in an essay dated April 1998:
"The dream behind the web is of a common information space in
which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is
essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything,
be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished.”
("The World Wide Web: A very short personal history", available on
his webpage on the W3C website)
The first blog was launched in 1997. A blog is an online diary
kept by a person or a group, usually in reverse chronological
order, and can be updated every minute or once a month. There were
14 million blogs worldwide in July 2005, with 80,000 new blogs per
day. According to Technorati, the first blog search engine, there
were 65 million blogs in December 2006, with 175,000 new blogs per
day. Some blogs are devoted to photos (photoblogs), music
(audioblogs or podcasts), and videos (vlogs or videoblogs).
The wiki concept became quite popular in 2000. Deriving from the
Hawaiian term "wiki" ("fast"), a wiki is a website allowing
multiple users to collaborate online on the same project. Users
can contribute to drafting content, editing it, improving it, and
updating it. The software can be simple or more elaborate. A
simple program handles text and hyperlinks. With a more elaborate
program, one can embed images, charts, tables, etc. The most
famous wiki is Wikipedia.
Facebook was founded in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and his
fellow students as a social network. Originally created for the
students of Harvard University, it was then available to students
from any university in the U.S. before being open to anyone
worldwide in September 2006, to connect with relatives, friends
and strangers. Facebook was the second most visited website after
Google, with 500 million users in June 2010, while sparking
debates on privacy issues.
Founded in 2006 by Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone, Twitter is a social
networking and micro-blogging tool to send free short messages of
140 characters maximum, called tweets, via the internet, IM or SMS.
Sometimes described as the SMS of the internet, Twitter gained
worldwide popularity, with 106 million users in April 2010, and
300,000 new users per day. As for tweets, there were 5,000 per day
in 2007, 300,000 in 2008, 2.5 million in 2009, 50 million in
January 2010, and 55 million in April 2010, with the archiving of
public tweets by the Library of Congress as a reflection of the
trends of our time.
We now try to fulfill the second part of Tim Berners-Lee’s dream,
according to his essay dated April 1998: “There was a second part
of the dream, too, dependent on the web being so generally used
that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary
embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialize.
That was that once the state of our interactions was online, we
could then use computers to help us analyze it, make sense of what
we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better
work together."