What is Web 2.0
What is Web 2.0 ?
This term was coined by Tim O'Reilly. With rich interfaces, live data, and instant feedback, applications based on Web 2.0 technologies can be more engaging and productive than the static applications of the past. These new applications enable the personalization and control that users appreciate and help businesses move at the speed of the Web. Before we try to get an understanding of Web 2.0, we need a little history of web 1.0 which no one realized until now when we call we are in the Web 2.0 world.
Web 1.0 was the era where users were being "pushed" information to them with no idea of what they liked or wanted. 
It was up to the users to filter out what is required and scrap the rest. This was done using different email subscriptions, web sites publishing information on their sites, be it news sites or other business sites and even to the extreme of sending stock and other updates to their cell phones. Then it lead to a slightly better version using portals where people could have their own version of the portal with a customized set of functionalities. But here again people ended up creating multiple portals since one was not sufficient being only limited to the exposure that company had. Lot of people were so demanding that some went to the extreme of getting their own personal websites and integrating everything into it from the different portals and web sites using screen scrapping and other technologies. This was not something everyone could afford to do monetarily as well as technically. Domain registration and web site hosting was very costly and mastering all these technologies seemed too cumbersome for a large audience as well as purchasing all these softwares for their web sites was a nightmare as well. This lead to the advent of open source software where interested people joined together creating different open source communities and created capabilities which they used and kept the source code open for everyone to understand it and build on it. This did semmed to be a fun thing for lot of the technical geeks since now they could do pretty much anything with all these free resources. With this sprang a number of such open source communities building softwares from CRM applicatons, Databases, etc to small editors, DVD copiers and so on. This also created a community concept among developers worldwide where they all belonged to different organizations but shared a common vision. To be effective in building in these communities they wanted collaboration tools. That is where a lot of effective tools and technologies came into the picture and the so called name of Web 2.0.
Technologies such as weblogs (blogs), social bookmarking, wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds (and other forms of many-to-many publishing), social software, web application programming interfaces (APIs), online web services, REST services etc are some of those major ones looked upon in the Web 2.0 context.
People across the world have been so demanding which lead to these revolutionary changes. This might not be completely true for everyone since still there are a lot of people in the Web 1.0 world not knowing the trends in technology or being happy with those capabilties. But the businesses who have been watching these trends closely have been moving fast enough to not be left behind in this race.
Currently(2007) the speed in which we are moving is so fast that by the time I am done here with this article we might be in a Web 3.0 era. 
Now what could that be? Maybe technology will evolve in a way where storage will all be virtual and you can read and store all your information through any device. How about I see an article on the web using my laptop but have to head home not having time to read it. I get into my car and play it while I drive and listen to while driving and after I reach home I continue watching that on my TV. I don't worry about where I store if at all I store. Another example could be that I take home videos using my camcorder or take pictures using a camera and use a TV's interface or laptop to view it without having to move the data around. Would'nt all that be cool. There are certain companies getting very close to that but having something robust enough is still a long way ahead.
