Bubble 2.0!! When will it burst??

During 1995-2001, there was an incredible rise in the number of Internet based companies like Yahoo.com, Amazon.com, because of increased usage of Internet in that period. As a result, Internet sector has become a part of the country’s economy. Also, this growth had a profound impact on the stock markets of modern countries. This Information Technology (IT) boom was also called as “Dot-com bubble” by most of the business experts. The Internet created much of the hype in stock markets during that period.
As you can see from the above graph, market share values plummeted from March, 2000. One of the primary reasons for this drop was that the Dot-com companies were concentrating more on Y2K switchover than doing business. This sudden drop in the market was called Dot-com bubble burst. After the Dot-com bubble burst, many of the newly established internet-based companies could not survive the market and some of them even had to close. Also, many of the market analysts started saying that the Web was over hyped. (no author, Wikipedia, Dot-com bubble. Retrieved November 7, 2007)
Later, many new web technologies like public web services (APIs), AJAX, weblogs, wikis (are explained in the following sections) emerged. The Web usage also started increasing as exciting new web sites and applications like Google Maps, Flickr, MySpace, Bittorrent took birth. All of these applications were built using Web as a platform. This increase in the Internet usage started a debate in most of the technology groups as they thought that this could be the beginning of another Dot-com bubble. Many people thought that this was an evolution of the World Wide Web. Thus, there were many Web development conferences held on Web 2.0 from then.
It was during a brainstorming session between O’Reily media and MediaLive international, the term “Web 2.0” took birth. It was coined by Dale Dougherty, a vice-president of O’Reilly Media Inc. Dave suggested that the Web is in a renaissance with changing rules involving business models (O’Reilly, 2005). Initially, they used this word for naming Web Development conferences. Many people felt that this could be used for Web applications which tend have Web 2.0 features. The term has become so popular that every web application which incorporated any new technology was referred as a Web 2.0 application. Consequently, World Wide Web was retroactively phrased as Web 1.0 (O’Reilly, 2005).
When anyone hears the term “Web 2.0” for the first time, it may sound like a software upgrade version number. For example, music software called Winamp, which had a version number 5.4 has upgraded its software to Winamp 5.5. But, it’s not true for this case as there were no technological upgrades to the current World Wide Web. Indeed, it is a combination of current technologies like AJAX, XML, RSS feeds, wikis (will be explained in the further sections) etc. That’s the reason Tim O’Reilly called Web 2.0 as a meme. According to Wikitionary.com, Meme means “a cultural unit (an idea or value or pattern of behavior) that is passed from one generation to another by non genetic means.” (no author, Wikitionary, meme)

In the following sections of this paper, I will compare Web 2.0 and Web 1.0 so that you can easily understand the factors that differentiate them. After that I will discuss technologies and standards that play a key role with in the Web 2.0 concept. I will discuss about various Web 2.0 Design Patterns which are the underlying principles that Web 2.0 applications are built on. Finally, I will categorize the Web 2.0 applications which are really playing the big game on the Internet today based on certain characteristics.