May - June 2008
Entrepreneur21
Gaining Momentum: Who's in the Lead? The Top Five Web 2.0 Success Stories for 2007 By: The Editorial Team
S
o what exactly is Web 2.0? More than anything, it's a revolution in the tech world. Web 2.0 is a platform in web technology and design that facilitates web-based communities and hosted services in an effort to promote creativity, collaboration, and sharing. It is a misconception that Web 2.0 is a new type of technology. The technology has been around since the start of the web, but its use is only now gaining momentum through “the philosophy of mutually maximizing collective intelligence and added value for each participant by formalized and dynamic information sharing and creation.” (Hogg et al, 2006) Aside form the usual Myspace, Facebook, YouTube, Skype and LimeWire crowd, here are the top five notable leaders of Web 2.0 worth mentioning.
avoid it? It's actually much easier than chasing or being chased, and it's called Flickr, a new Web 2.0 based technology that allows users to “tag” people in their photos. Flickr, Yahoo's photo-sharing site, is their best semantic umbrella application and the best application of semantic categorization for photo-sharing on the web. The site is set up in such a way that browsing it is easy and fun. Flickr's lead in photo sharing offers a few add-on bonus options like enriching the community through pools, clusters, and groups; preserving rights to your photos through Creative Commons, free and professional accounts, and open API.
NetVibes Know the art of personalization, of putting your special touch on it? Know who's made it easy to do for your web page? NetVibes. With RSS and Ajax technologies entering mainstream usage, a smarter, more personalized start page has taken the lead with NetVibes. NetVibes is a Paris-based company that has created an accumulation tool that enables each user to create a personalized page by pulling news feeds and data from web services into modular boxes. These boxes have customizable display options and update automatically NetVibes supports nine different languages. Users are able to pull in any RSS feed on the web, in including Flickr photos, Alexa charts and to-do lists, and Writely documents. NetVibes has interfaces for Gmail and Yahoo webmail services and to top it all off, no user registration is required.
Flickr Did you know there's another way to get tagged, other than by running around on the playground, trying to
Writely The ground-shattering idea behind Web 2.0 is that the web can take over application hosting duties from the desktop. In simple terms, your Microsoft Office documents, lists, e-mails, contacts, and spreadsheets take up residence on the internet. Having your desktop available online means it's accessible 24/7 regardless of where you are or whose computer you're on. Appropriately named, Writely is a browser-based word 29