[Summary]
The term "web 2.0" was invented in 2004 by Tim O'Reilly, a publisher of
computer books, as a title for a series of conferences he was
organizing. The web 2.0 has been based on community and sharing, with a
wealth of websites whose content has been 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, 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 April 1998 in an essay: "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 fullfill 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."