Web 2.0, and what it means to you
Welcome to “The Web and You,” the new Blog that we’re starting up here at Avelient. Businesses often develop because they fulfill a need, and Avelient’s course has been no different as it grows in both size and popularity. We began as a consulting company purely for Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology companies, and while we’re still strongly rooted in that industry, with consultants working at major Pharmacetucials, an increasingly popular biotechnology and pharmaceutical blog, and a meetup group that meets regularly in New York City, we decided to create a new blog to develop content that concerns another segment of our customers: the small business.
On this blog, we intend to focus on things that might be unfamiliar to many small businesses, and we’ll try to wrestle with and define the buzzwords you may be hearing increasingly tossed about by industry magazines, the local news media, and even your kids.
This week, we’re focusing on the term “Web 2.0″ and what it actually means. The term was originally coined as part of a conference brainstorming session between O’Reilly publishers and MediaLive international just after the dot com bubble burst in 2001. They decided to create the conference as a call to action, really to push the existing boundaries of web development and enter a new generation of internet use. O’Reilly, in fact, wrote an extensive article that defines the meaning of “Web 2.0″ in great detail, a good read if you have the time.
So what is Web 2.0? Well, it’s a platform, almost a philosophy if you will, of how web services and applications should behave in order to promote a rich user experience and the proliferation of knowledge among the masses. If the browser loading up simple web pages with static content was your Web 1.0 experience, your Web 2.0 experience is a web page that changes on a regular basis to provide new information that is of interest to you. It is interactive, in that you are not just a passive participant, reading about what interests you, but an active participant, reading, responding (in the form of comments or polls), and even editing (in the case of wikis).
Web 2.0 sites are often applications that are fluid in nature; that is, they are ever-changing interactive sites that depend as much on feedback from its users as it does on the programmers that implement change. They leverage tools such as AJAX, a technology which allows developers to load specific areas of a page based on user input, a vast improvement over the “Web 1.0″ way where an entire page would have to be re-loaded no matter how small the change.
Web 2.0 sites are not necessarily easy to develop, but their user experience oozes simplicity and function over form. Twitter is a perfect example of this. The concept is simple: allow users to update their status in 160-character increments over the course of the day and allow others to “follow” them as they post updates. Slightly more robust is Facebook, which allows you to post daily updates and pictures while allowing you to follow the same updates and pictures that other friends post. The keys in both instances are simplicity, community, and the collection of user thoughts and experiences into a single place. And, if moving to a Web 2.0 strategy is important to building your business, then you must be willing to adopt a spartan interface that promotes a community though input from your visitors, regardless of whether they are or will become customers.
In the next couple of weeks, I plan to examine blogging and how it can help get you started with a Web 2.0 experience on your site. I will examine social media as a business tool and how it can help you reach out to your customers like never before. I’ll examine exactly what is meant by Search Engine Optimization and strategies for making your comany more visible to your customers via search engine results. And I’ll even look at a good web page layout, and how the principals of user interface design are important when considering your web page audience.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you’ll feel free to leave feedback and answer our poll below. I hope you enjoy our new site!
Does this help clear up what Web 2.0 means?
- Yes. (100%, 4 Votes)
- No! (0%, 0 Votes)
Total Voters: 4
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I met Mariano on Friday morning, where he was the keynote speaker for a breakfast meeting. His presentation, entitled “The Web and Your Business” was insightful and interactive. If you need to understand Web 2.0, watch this blog for more!