Starter For Ten's Net34 Blog

I had been a little confused over the whole idea of Web 2.0. Watching the YouTube video "The Machine is Us/ing us" helped clarify it for me, to some extent.

I think that prior to Web 2, internet users were just that, users, or end users of existing sites. But now we users are become the creators, we participate in creating on the internet rather than just using it. By blogging, we can "publish" our writing, YouTube allows us to "star" in our own videos with a world wide audience. Wikipedia is not just an on-line encylopedia - a user can edit entries rather than just read them!

On a personal level, I can see the difference between Web 1 and 2 when I compare 2 different sites, FriendsReuinted (the "old" site) and Facebook. I joined FriendsReunited back in 2001. It cost something like $20 to join, and you could find school friends by locating your school and then scrolling through lists for different years. Once you "found" a friend, you then sent a message to them through the site, and then waited for a reply. The only way a person could reply to your message was if they were a paid up subscriber too. There was an option to put a photo of yourself on there and a brief description but that was about it. It was essentially an online database.

Fast forward to 2009 and Facebook (a Web 2 application). Facebook allows me to search for acquaintances and then "invite" them to be friends. I can then chat online to them, send them everything from (virtual) flowers to football jerseys, keep everybody updated at the same time on what I am doing by posting on my wall (rather than having to rely on sending individual emails), post whole photo albums onto my site, invite friends to play games & quizzes etc etc, and above all, Facebook is free (well, so is FriendsReunited now, but it wasn't in 2001). There is infinitely more user content and participation involved.

All this has become possible since XML gave us the ability to separate form from content, something that HTML was not able to do. Does this make sense? It does to me (sort of...)!

In comparing the two Net 11 Resource lists, the furl list is much easier to read. I can also see that it is interactive, I have the option of filtering and sorting the topics for example. Underneath each article heading there is a description of the article, plus the url, the date it was saved, how many views it has had etc. There is an option of adding the articles to an RSS Feed. On the downside, the page also features advertisements.

The HTML list is just that, a list of links, with a brief description of the link. There is no date information, and no indication of how many times that particular link has been viewed. On the plus side, there are no ads...

I mentioned in an earlier post that I had never heard of 'furling' before. But now I have, it is something I will definitely use in the future - except that I won't use Furl as its being phased out! I'm currently looking at Delicious. I am looking forward to putting all of my favourite links into one source (rather than being littered all through Favourites, like they are now!)

I just had a thought - what will Web 3.0 bring us?


P.S. I put that last bit in about Web 3.0 as a bit of a joke (I didn't even think there might actually be a web 3 yet). I then googled web 3.0 and found all sorts of entries......

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