Web 2.0: At the tipping point

IDG News Service - As the World Wide Web evolves into a more collaborative platform, the technologies and business models involved in that transition are being swept up into the "Web 2.0" rubric, a term vague enough to encompass almost anything one cares to push under its banner, but catchy in summing up the widespread sense that the Internet is at a tipping point.

The idea that the Web is transitioning to a new era, however, is grounded in real examples. Beneath the hype is a growing number of sites that are offering collaborative services, underpinned by new business models.

IT publisher Tim O'Reilly, who coined the term for the debut Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco in October 2004, was hard-pressed to define the term more concretely for the second conference. He resorted to offering a list of companies exemplifying the idea that the Web is evolving from a collection of sites controlled by individual publishers into an interactive platform.

DoubleClick Inc., an online advertising sales platform, and photo-album hosting site Ofoto Inc. are both Web 1.0 services, according to O'Reilly. Google Inc.'s open-to-all-publishers AdSense network and Flickr, an interactive photo hosting and community site, are Web 2.0. "Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn't have a hard boundary but rather a gravitational core," O'Reilly wrote in his essay.

Flickr illustrates the power of the new model, industry executives said.

"They created an ecosystem and a phenomenon much larger than what you would expect a small team to be able to do," said Bradley Horowitz, director of technology development at Yahoo Inc.

Yahoo was so taken with Flickr that it bought Flickr's tiny parent company, Ludicorp Research & Development Ltd., last March for an undisclosed sum. It followed with a December buyout of del.icio.us, a community-focused bookmarking service that attracts the same kind of buzz Flickr earned.

Launched in February 2004, Flickr emphasizes sharing; its style incorporates hooks popularized by blogs like classification tags and reader comments. The site also uses the open-source PHP scripting language and runs on free MySQL database software.

Yahoo's portfolio of acquired applications also includes group events calendar site Upcoming.org, music playlists swap site Webjay and blog updates tracker blo.gs.

Among media giants, Yahoo is jostling for the Web 2.0 vanguard position with its longtime search rival, Google.

Google, too, keeps an acquisitive eye on promising start-ups. It shook up the blogging world in 2003 by purchasing Pyra Labs, a small venture that developed the popular Blogger service, and later picked up photo software developer Picasa to jump-start its photo-sharing services. In May, Google acquired Dodgeball, a mobile social networking venture that lets cell-phone-toting users locate nearby Dodgeball-registered friends.