Comment by jameshart
5 days ago
Web 2.0 wasn’t just hype. It was also rounded corners and glassy lozenge buttons implemented with CSS sliding door background sprites.
5 days ago
Web 2.0 wasn’t just hype. It was also rounded corners and glassy lozenge buttons implemented with CSS sliding door background sprites.
Web 2.0 has a few different definitions but one of them is when HTML pages started to contain significant JavaScript, and another is when websites started to be middlemen between users rather than users interacting only with the website operators.
To give it some value as a term, what Tim O’Reilly meant by it was a shift to participatory, user content driven websites. Blogs, Flickr and Wikipedia were quintessentially Web 2.0 phenomena.
To me, Wikipedia was like proto- web 2.0. That is, yes, it fits the definition, but significantly predated the trend. It was ahead of its time.
I think it's a bit fuzzy for "blogs". To me, it wasn't really until blogging became extremely accessible, that is without spinning up a website running software on your own servers, did I consider it "web 2.0". But then, yes, I agree that the explosion of blogs was fully part of that trend. (I was dismissive of this at the time, but in hindsight I think it's rad and I don't understand what my probably was.)
Definitely flickr is quintessential here!
Yeah I think of it as when user to user generated content became prevalent. I think the increasing prevalence of javascript interactivity was more of a response to making such websites more functional.