Web 2.0 is a slippery beast. Like most powerful tools and technologies, Web 2.0 is whatever you make of it. Type-A go-getter? Business is booming on the 2.0 frontier, with new ways to communicate, collaborate, and tap into public opinion. Social butterfly? Social networking has trimmed the proverbial six degrees of separation way down - by at least four degrees. And even if you sneak to the Web to waste time rather than save it, new technology delivers exactly what you want to surf, helping you waste time in a much more, uh, quality way.

 

 

You've been doing most of this stuff for years. If all of the Web 2.0 hoopla sounds like a clever marketing spin on the kinds of things that you (or your geekier buddies) have been doing for ages - engaging in Star Trek vs. Star Wars debates (and massive pr0n, natch) on Usenet, for example - that's because it is.

 

What makes Web 2.0 "new" is the evolved technology that enables more user-interactivity features while also providing more personal privacy and security, in the case of your online banking and other business - or quite the opposite on the social side of Web 2.0. Geezers like us remember the days when savvy Web users vigilantly guarded every shred of their personal information online - which must be the reason Apple's eWorld service never caught on. In contrast, Web 2.0 users create elaborate personal profiles and willfully share interests that determine their place in the online community. And for the wary, MySpace and the others have added privacy features so you can block your information from random creeps.

 

 

2. It's All About the API

 

One little acronym drives them all. API is one of those acronyms that pundits and real geeks throw around to sound knowledgeable (pundits) or communicate with peers (real geeks). But to the rest of us, it's about as vague a term as Web 2.0 itself.

 

In Web 2.0 context, an API, which stands for application programming interface, isn't quite a software application, but rather a way to create mini applications that are designed to fetch and display information from online sources. Google Search is an early example of an open API: You can use it on the Web at www.google.com. You can use it directly from your Safari or Firefox toolbar. You can add it to your own website by pasting in a snippet of code. And there's even a Google Search Dashboard Widget. All use the same underlying API. What's more, Google recently released a beta version of Google Desktop (desktop.google.com/mac), an implementation of its mighty search engine that you install on your Mac to search your own files, instead of (or along with) searching the Web. Essentially, Google used its own API to create a stand-alone desktop application. Engineering types call that eating your own dog food.

 

 

3. MySpace Is Only the Tip of the Iceberg

 

Social networking has already come a long way, baby. Web 2.0 is more than just signing up at a social networking site to find other fans of your peculiar hobby or interest. Web 2.0 is all about new ways to build social networks. In the old days, Yahoo ruled as the default sorter, characterizer, and organizer of the Web's endless pages. Today, members of sites like MySpace (www.myspace.com), Facebook (www.facebook.com), Bebo (www.bebo.com), Xanga (www.xanga.com), and most recently Zooped (www.zooped.com) stake their claim, build a garish webpage, and tag it with their own idea of what's what and where they fit in the grand scheme of the Net. The effect snowballs as more users discover and designate each other as friends, then add descriptive tags to their own profiles so that other members can find them too, which serves to expand the reach of each member's own tags in an endless friend-of-a-friend cascade. There are even metasites related to social networking: Mashable (www.mashable.com) is a blog that specifically covers social networking news.

 

Xanga proves that MySpace isn’t the only place you can create a chaotic personal page to win friends and influence people.

 

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4. It Modernizes the Telephone

 

Why call when you can video chat? Web 2.0 brings into the mainstream new ways for people to reach one another - even though many of the technologies that allow this communication have been around since Web 1.0. Webmail has replaced the old-fashioned email client (that is, software), making your messages accessible from anywhere. When you're at your Mac, iChat and other instant messaging (IM) apps have replaced email as the go-to method for on-the-spot communiqués.

 

Web 2.0 brings these different modes of communication together: You can send text messages to your mom's cell phone from the Internet, for example. With iSight cameras built into iMacs, MacBooks, and MacBook Pros, video chat is an everyday reality for those with bountiful bandwidth - otherwise audio chat is the next best thing. In between is one of Web 2.0's true killer apps, voice over IP (VoIP). It's the useful evolution of Internet telephony, which has been around longer than the Web itself. VoIP uses Internet protocol (IP) technology to send voice data over Net connections, offering you a set monthly fee rather than per-minute call charges, and the ability to access your VoIP account from anywhere in the world to make local calls.

 

But VoIP has a few drawbacks, mainly its dependence on the Internet. You can't spell VoIP without IP, and you can't use it without Internet access. That means that you can't use VoIP during a power outage - although many cordless phones don't work when the power's down either. The equalizer: Public Wi-Fi networks and portable VoIP phones are on the horizon and will greatly increase VoIP's functional reach.

 

 

5. It Works for Work, Too

 

It's 2007. Shouldn't we all be telecommuting by now? Actual businesses are using Web 2.0 technology to streamline everything, from information dissemination, to group collaboration on documents and projects, to group scheduling - all, as business types like to say, "on the same page." Most businesses use the company intranet for such things, using commercial or custom software to create a virtual all-staff meeting place/information clearinghouse that only authorized users can access, and usually only when they're within the company's physical walls - or outside via virtual private network (VPN) connections. Progressive companies are implementing the social aspects of Web 2.0 as well, doing things like installing company wikis where worker bees, managers, and bosses can share ideas.

 

Web 2.0 also makes telecommuting and collaborating with far-off colleagues more efficient and secure. Trick sites like ThinkFree (www.thinkfree.com) and Google Docs & Spreadsheets (docs.google.com) offer collaborative work spaces where colleagues across the globe can work on documents together in real time, regardless whether they're on a Mac or ... something else.

 

 

6. Your Photos Can Do More Than Just Sit There

 

Web 2.0 apps let you edit, animate, stitch together, and of course share photos online for free. As an antidote to all of that workaday productivity, Web 2.0 brings mature versions of early-Web treats like GifWorks, which, since the late '90s, has let you create cool little animated GIF images for your home page (it's still going strong at www.gifworks.com). Web 2.0 ups the ante with sites like Picnik (www.picnik.com), which provides useful photo-editing tools (autofix, rotate, crop, resize, exposure, colors, sharpen, red-eye removal, and more) in a Flash interface. Meanwhile, CleVR (www.clevr.com) helps you stitch contiguous shots of a scene into a fully navigable VR movie or a flat panoramic image. Both sites also provide easy sharing options, such as precoded snippets for adding the output to MySpace or a personal site.

 

Sites like Picnik let you edit photos before sharing them.

 

 

7. It Brings TV to Your Mac

 

Go beyond YouTube clips of half-drunk college kids. The future of online video is feature films in streaming HD. But while the lawyers work that out, you can watch television programming online. All three major networks offer their most popular shows for online viewing, and the iTunes Store has plenty more. More interestingly, if you still watch TV shows broadcast the old way, you may have noticed that most of the big shows run a teaser at the end inviting viewers online to see the full episode again, and/or watch deleted scenes and cast interviews, and read cast blogs. You can even get TV content piped onto your AOL, Microsoft, or Yahoo home page.

 

Meanwhile, user-driven video sites are still going strong. Viddler (www.viddler.com) takes tagging a step further, letting you tag specific moments in a video, rather than just the video itself. And promoting the "everyone's a reporter" mentality of Web 2.0, LiveLeak (www.liveleak.com) prompts users to upload "newsworthy" videos that they captured by being in the right place at the right time.

 

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8. Some Sites Have L-o-n-g Legs

 

Early websites are finding a second life. The user-generated-content model has been around for at least a decade, as evidenced by Stick Figure Death Theatre (www.sfdt.com). Back in the late '90s, SFDT was an instant classic, entertaining Web surfers with animated depictions of stick figures dying in all sorts of heinous ways - and inspiring them to create their own submissions. Fast-forward 10 years and SFDT lives, only now, users contribute more elaborate animations, using a mix of technology from Web 2.0 sites: Adobe's Flash, YouTube videos, and content from around the Web.

 

Stick Figure Death Theatre is going strong with Web 2.0 updates, like Flash animations and a snippet of code that you can use to display the movies on your MySpace page.

 

 

9. There Are Skeptics

 

Cue the collective groan from Web 1.0 survivors. If you don't think the big tech companies who weathered the Web's first commercial bust aren't going to do whatever it takes to wring a buck out of Web 2.0, we've got a bridge to sell you (payments accepted via PayPal). How far will they go? Paying employees and other stooges to post favorable reviews and otherwise promote - or in Microsoft's case, defend - the company. We've even seen job ads on craigslist.org for paid forum posters.

 

When the Web first emerged as a viable platform for business, shopping, and other such endeavors, the true Internet geeks bemoaned the commercialization of their "information superhighway." Then they laughed when the bubble burst - and now they're predicting Web 2.0's demise. For proof, Google "Web 2.0 crash." Or just check out uncov (www.uncov.com).

 

Just one of many gloomy predictions for Web 2.0.

 

 

Stand back - we don't know how big this thing's gonna get! Every age has its skeptics, and the Web 2.0 haters might be in for a long sulk. At the first Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this spring, the underlying buzz came from a study conducted by online research firm Hitwise (www.hitwise.com), which claims that the bulk of content posted at Web 2.0 sites like Flickr, YouTube, and Wikipedia is posted by a tiny fraction of the sites' users: 0.2 percent, 0.16 percent, and 4.6 percent, respectively. When or if more users start participating rather than just watching, the already staggering amount of content will reach critical mass. It's also been estimated that 2 percent of the 1 billion Web users have their own blogs - that's 20 million bloggers. Another indication that Web 2.0 is on a rampage: The list of companies sponsoring the event (www.web2expo.com) is long and full of nearly unpronounceable.

 

 

BONUS TIP: Make Way for Web 3.0

 

Imagine having a dozen or so psychic personal assistants who comb the Web looking for all the information you're going to need someday soon, accurately predict stock market and cultural trends, and effortlessly plan your perfect vacation or early retirement. That, in theory, is Web 3.0.

 

The next version of the Web is expected to use artificial-intelligence technology that can think the way humans do - technology that's smart enough to make connections between disparate bits of data, guessing, for example, that your recent searches for inns in Maine and rental cars mean that you'll also want info about highway construction (buried in a local news site) and the best place to get lobster rolls along the way (culled from the RoadFood forum).

 

That's the dream, anyway. The reality is that Web 3.0 - coming in a couple of years - is likely to be a more polished, intuitive version of Web 2.0. We'll probably see some AI technology, and we'll be working on the Web more and using installed software less. Of course by then, we'll be chattering excitedly about Web 4.0. - Michelle Delio