This post extends on a conversation I was having with Gomer. In it, we discussed what Web 2.0 means to us, and we both admit although it’s new to us, we think the concept is the future. Usability is what seperates the “men from the boys” in a sense in the online world. Picture almost any website that you’ve visited in the last few years frequently. It’s a site you “use” isn’t it? Well now we can one step further. When we use the site, it changes along with our input. This makes web usability a fluid environment. But we need to be even more specific in our terminology, since imprecise language is a potential pitfall of communication. Let’s look at a real world example and see how it meets our criteria of Web 2.0.
Web 2.0 sites respond to users. A great example of this is NetVibes. NetVibes greets you with a generic page that says “Type your name here”. You type your name and Netvibes saves it!
That’s a delightful feeling and incredibly intuitive. You aren’t confronted with a lengthy signup process in order to use the service. That type of immediacy is perfect in a world of immediate gratification seekers.
Web 2.0 websites get information from other sources. Netvibes doesn’t supply it’s own backend for data. It’s merely a collection of data from other sources. Netvibes exists in order to help you organize information that’s already there!
Web 2.0 websites create unique uses for existent technology. As in our last example, Netvibes pulls information from various sources and then creates a new problem solving website based on what you entered. That dynamism seperates Netvibes from a lot of other websites because they aren’t reliant solely on information that they create. They leverage the strength of many other websites to build their own unique selling proposition.
The example of Netvibes helps us expand our terminology and helps us define what we mean when we say “Web 2.0″. Let’s look at our current checklist and see how we can expand.
Web 2.0 websites:
- Engage users in unique ways
- Are not self-contained units – but pull data from other services
- Look to create something unique – even if it means creating a unique use for current applications
- Make signup transparent or incredibly easy
- Don’t alienate their users
- Listen to suggestions and feedback
This gives us a basic starting point to discuss Web 2.0 websites. Do you like these definitions? Can you think of more or something you’d like to see changes?