Research - Web 2.0 Evolution

University of Reading - School of Systems Engineering Research

Web 2.0 Recent acquisitions:

EBay bought Skype for $2.65 billion in 2005

Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006

News International bought MySpace for $580 million in 2005

Yahoo! looking to buy FaceBook for $1 billion

Yahoo! also bought Del.icio.us and Flickr for ‘undisclosed amounts’

ITV bought FriendsReunited for £120 million

www.Wikipedia.com

"Web 2.0 is a term often applied to a percieved ongoing transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of websited to a full-fledged computing platform serving web applications to end users. Ultimately Web 2.0 services are expected to replace desktop computing applications for many purposes".

Tim O’Reilly (2005):

"Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform:

delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it

consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others

creating network effects through an "architecture of participation,"

and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences."