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Web 2.0 Preview

BusinessWeek has a “Best of the Web” Special Report on what is now commonly termed “Web 2.0“. It does a pretty good job at outlining the exciting “two-way” nature of the coming web. Here are a couple of quotes from the article to give you a good idea of what the future holds:

By the millions, they’re gathering and disseminating their own news with blogs and podcasts, creating customized article and photo feeds from their favorite sites and even annotating them with helpful text tags that others can search for on the Web site del.icio.us. They’re producing their own entertainment on video, social-networking, game, and photo-sharing sites such as Yahoo’s Flickr.

For a vivid illustration of what can be done,

Some enterprising folks are playing Web deejay. HousingMaps.com injects housing listings from Craigslist into Google Maps, so people can visualize a rental’s location.

And in summary,

Says Siva Kumar, president of the shopping search engine FatLens: “Where one site starts and another ends will increasingly be seamless.”

An important point about Web 2.0 that Rajesh Jain makes:

The Web finally breaks free from the browser. (See Widgets, Web-enabled desktop-like applications, Mobile applications, etc.)