When is the Web 2.0 bubble going to burst???

People, mostly teens are now a days seen hanging out on one social networking site or the others, most of them are just plain crap but quite a few of them are still making the users spend most of their time playing around with their buddies or scrappin' them such as Facebook, Myspace and Orkut.

What we are witnessing here is a phenonmenon unknown for by us a few years back. Earlier websites were used as brochures providing a kind of communication that still was one way, from the company to the users. Then came websites giving email services where we can have interaction but limited to a larger extent.

What followed was websites using comments posting, blogging, feed aggregation etc. Thus came the buzzword, "Web 2.0" The word was born during a brainstorming session between Tim O'Reilly and Dale Doherty while assessing the dot com crash in 2001 found that it gave rise to a whole new generation of websites and thus Web 2.0 conference was born. (See http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html for reference)

Web 2.0 websites are basically dynamic websites as against static websites which merely serve as brochures for their companies. These new age websites will encourage more participation from user.



Now what could be the effects of these Web 2.0 enabled websites. As i already mentioned, one thing that these websites can do is bring in more users who can participate in a website. User participation would lead to knowledge sharing.

We already know that people have an innate desire to share knowledge. Every person has some capability or the other to comment, voice opinion or give suggestion over one topic or other. The point here is that these websites will force people to post their comments, voice their concerns on the general web space. We also know that whenever we are up for something be it a movie, clothing, accessories, mobile, doctor ... i mean anything ... we always ask for opinions... though we might not follow them.

This leads us to the topic of the next post i.e. "User Generated Content: Hits and Misses". Watch out for this space to know more about UGC and its applications.

So opinions is what people like to give and also take from others. There is a definite market for it and many people have built strong businesses over the internet just by sharing comments and postings of different users.

Web 2.0 with all its features of blogging, sharing content over the internet, syndication and aggregation has been just 4 years old. But how much long will it last. People say that it is here to stay while some consider it as a bubble waiting to be burst.

Although sites such as Myspace and Facebook, Delicious and Digg, are adding more and more users day by day, their irrelevance will only grow by time when people realize it.

Also there are companies which are trying to implement web 2.0 technologies into their website unknown of its effects. Web 2.0 features though encourage the free spirit also attract unwanted elements. If not properly edited people might find unwanted content lingering on their website only to be edited and thrown out. Any unwanted content for a short period of time on a website can do enormous damage.

Finally webspace is an ever-evolving entity where the obvious cycle is moving from web 2.0 to web 3.0, which will most probably cover the video content. It is still to be seen whether how many users hold on to the web 2.0 websites.