The term "web 2.0" was invented in 2004 by Tim O'Reilly, a publisher of computer books, as a title for a series of conferences he was organizing.
The web 2.0 was based on community and sharing, with a wealth of websites whose content was supplied by users, such as blogs, wikis, social networks and collaborative encyclopedias. Wikipedia, Facebook and Twitter, of course, but also tens of thousands of others.
The web 2.0 may begin to fulfill the dream of Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the web in 1990, and wrote in April 1998 in an essay: "The dream behind the web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished.” ("The World Wide Web: A very short personal history", available on his webpage on the W3C website)
The first blog was launched in 1997. A blog is an online diary kept by a person or a group, usually in reverse chronological order, and can be updated every minute or once a month. There were 14 million blogs worldwide in July 2005, with 80,000 new blogs per day. According to Technorati, the first blog search engine, there were 65 million blogs in December 2006, with 175,000 new blogs per day. Some blogs are devoted to photos (photoblogs), music (audioblogs or podcasts), and videos (vlogs or videoblogs).
The wiki concept became quite popular in 2000. Deriving from the Hawaiian term "wiki" ("fast"), a wiki is a website allowing multiple users to collaborate online on the same project. Users can contribute to drafting content, editing it, improving it, and updating it. The software can be simple or more elaborate. A simple program handles text and hyperlinks. With a more elaborate program, one can embed images, charts, tables, etc. The most famous wiki is Wikipedia.
Facebook was founded in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow students as a social network. Originally created for the students of Harvard University, it was then available to students from any university in the U.S. before being open to anyone worldwide in September 2006, to connect with relatives, friends and strangers. Facebook was the second most visited website after Google, with 500 million users in June 2010, while sparking debates on privacy issues.
Founded in 2006 by Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone, Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging tool to send free short messages of 140 characters maximum, called tweets, via the internet, IM or SMS. Sometimes described as the SMS of the internet, Twitter gained worldwide popularity, with 106 million users in April 2010, and 300,000 new users per day. As for tweets, there were 5,000 per day in 2007, 300,000 in 2008, 2.5 million in 2009, 50 million in January 2010, and 55 million in April 2010, with the archiving of public tweets by the Library of Congress as a reflection of the trends of our time.
We now try to fullfill the second part of Tim Berners-Lee’s dream, according to his essay dated April 1998: “There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our interactions was online, we could then use computers to help us analyze it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together."
2005 > FROM PDAS TO SMARTPHONES
[Summary] In April 2001, there were 17 million PDAs versus 100,000 ebook readers worldwide, according to a Seybold Report available online. The Palm Pilot was launched as the first PDA in March 1996, with 23 million Palm Pilots sold between 1996 and 2002. Palm stayed the leader — 36.8% of PDAs were Palm Pilots in 2002 — despite a fierce competition from Microsoft’s Pocket PC and the PDAs of Hewlett-Packard, Sony, Handspring, Toshiba and Casio. The main platforms were Palm OS (for 55% of PDAs) and Pocket PC (for 25,7% of PDAs). People reading on PDAs could read on Mobipocket Reader (available in March 2000), Microsoft Reader (April 2000), Palm Reader (March 2001), Acrobat Reader (May 2001 for Palm Pilot, and December 2001 for Pocket PC), and finally Adobe Reader (May 2003), that replaced Acrobat Reader to read both standard PDF files and secure PDF files of copyrighted books. PDAs were then replaced by smartphones, from the Nokia 9210 in 2001 to the iPhone in April 2007.