By Ian Hardy
Web 2.0 wave starts to take hold
Sun Apr 22, 2007 20:47


Web 2.0 wave starts to take hold

By Ian Hardy
Click's North America technology correspondent

Whether you use your computer for work or fun, the programs you use generally have one thing in common - they are stored on your PC. Increasingly though, that software is moving online.

Google Labs logo
Google has made a variety of programs available online


What is it - the definition is imprecise at best, but it loosely describes a category of websites that are known for interactivity, collaboration and community.

Developments in underlying web technology make this all possible and mean that what the sites can do is very new. Simplicity is often the key. Often it is an online application that does one thing and does it well.'s Caroline McCarthy has a few favourites: "I have just started using a new site called Remember The Milk, which is a task manager. It's incredibly simple, a very easy to use list of things you have to do, places you have to go, things you have to buy, that sort of thing.

"Clipmarks is a site where you can just share clips or portions of a website rather than the entire bookmark, so it's good for quotations.

"Tumblr is basically a blogging platform for people who don't want to use a blogging platform. If you look at things like Wordpress and Blogger, which a lot of people use to create blogs, they're very functional. Tumblr is very simple."



"The idea of using your web browser as a tool is still a fairly new concept," explained Mark Chackerian of Picturedots.



A future online?


Adobe office in San Jose
They know it's going to be a big part of their companies in 10 years
Nick Thompson, Wired Magazine



"Microsoft and Adobe are in a bind," says Nick Thompson, senior editor of Wired Magazine. "They make tons of money from the software they sell in shrink-wrapped boxes. But they also know that the future is online software. So what do they do?

"I think they're doing two things. I think they are genuinely trying to figure out how to make this work, because they know it's going to be a big part of their companies in 10 years.

"But they're also trying to keep their current customers happy, and they're trying not to make it look like you should switch immediately because maybe you should buy that one last Office upgrade."



Advertisers' advantage


"There will always be people who say that this is just a mechanism to get more eyeballs on our ads," says Jonathan Rochelle of Google.

"But I don't think people see that, and I certainly don't see that as evil, as a bad thing. If that was the case and we ended up getting more people to look at our ads it's not necessarily a bad thing."






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