Web 2.0 and social media platforms

Web 2.0 describes World Wide Web websites that emphasize user-generated content, usability (ease of use, even by non-experts), and interoperability (this means that a website can work well with other products, systems and devices) for end users. The term was popularized by Tim O'Reilly and Dale Dougherty at the O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 Conference in late 2004, though it was coined by Darcy DiNucci in 1999.^[1][2][3][4] Web 2.0 does not refer to an update to any technical specification, but to changes in the way Web pages are designed and used.

A Web 2.0 website may allow users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to the first generation of Web 1.0-era websites where people were limited to the passive viewing of content. As well, in contrast to Web 1.0-era websites, in which the text was often unlinked, users of Web 2.0 websites can often "click" on words in the text to access additional content on the website or be linked to an external website. Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking sites and social media sites (e.g., Facebook), blogs, wikis, folksonomies ("tagging" keywords on websites and links), video sharing sites (e.g., YouTube), hosted services, Web applications ("apps"), collaborative consumption platforms, and mashup applications, that allow users to blend the digital audio from multiple songs together to create new music.

Whether Web 2.0 is substantively different from prior Web technologies has been challenged by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, who describes the term as jargon.^[5] His original vision of the Web was "a collaborative medium, a place where we [could] all meet and read and write".^[6][7] On the other hand, the term Semantic Web (sometimes referred to as Web 3.0)^{[citation needed]} was coined by Berners-Lee to refer to a web of data that can be processed by 

Web 1.0 

is a retronym referring to the first stage of the World Wide Web's evolution. According to Cormode, G. and Krishnamurthy, B. (2008): "content creators were few in Web 1.0 with the vast majority of users simply acting as consumers of content."^[9] Personal web pages were common, consisting mainly of static pages hosted on ISP-run web servers, or on free web hosting services such as Geocities.^[10][11] With the advent of Web 2.0, it was more common for the average web user to have social networking profiles on sites such as Myspace and Facebook, as well as personal blogs on one of the new low-cost web hosting services or a dedicated blog host like Blogger or LiveJournal. The content for both were generated dynamically from stored content, allowing for readers to comment directly on pages in a way that was not previously common.^{[citation needed]}

Some Web 2.0 capabilities were present in the days of Web 1.0 but they were implemented differently. For example, a Web 1.0 site may have had a guestbook page to publish visitor comments, instead of a comment section at the end of each page. Server performance and bandwidth considerations had a long comments thread on each page, which could potentially slow down the site. Terry Flew, in his 3rd edition of New Mediadescribed the differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0:

"move from personal websites to blogs and blog site aggregation, from publishing to participation, from web content as the outcome of large up-front investment to an ongoing and interactive process, and from content management systems to links based on "tagging" website content using keywords (folksonomy)".

Web 2.0[edit]

The term "Web 2.0" was first used in January 1999 by Darcy DiNucci, an information architecture consultant. In her article, "Fragmented Future", DiNucci writes:^[4]

The Web we know now, which loads into a browser window in essentially static screenfuls, is only an embryo of the Web to come. The first glimmerings of Web 2.0 are beginning to appear, and we are just starting to see how that embryo might develop. The Web will be understood not as screenfuls of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens. It will [...] appear on your computer screen, [...] on your TV set [...] your car dashboard [...] your cell phone [...] hand-held game machines [...] maybe even your microwave oven.

Writing when Palm Inc. was introducing its first Web-capable personal digital assistant, supporting Web access with WAP, DiNucci saw the Web "fragmenting" into a future that extended beyond the browser/PC combination it was identified with. She focused on how the basic information structure and hyperlinking mechanism introduced by HTTP would be used by a variety of devices and platforms. As such, her use of the "2.0" designation refers to a next version of the Web that does not directly relate to the term's current use.^{[citation needed]}