Web 2.0

Studying and working in technology is very exciting. It's a field that is always moving, always changing. Years ago, being online meant having a simple web site. Static and never moving, but you had a web precence. It was dull, but it ghad information on it, and this content was usefull. When we update the school association with all the old exams from past sessions, the students stopped comming to pick them up in dead-tree editions and where able to get them all online. Content was king, and the value of a page was all about content.

Nowadays, content is still king, but it is not the only criteria in deciding how important or usefull a page is. That's because pages are not static anymore. I think the Tim O'Reilly article about Web 2.0 is a good introduction on the past and future trends of the web. The web is comming from static, content-and-layout oriented pages to interactives, layout yourself and socially-produced-content. Among the list of existing Web 2.0 sites, there are 2 trend that I, personnaly, find interesting:

User (social) collaboration
Sites like Digg are good exemples. I think this trend is the reason behind most yahoo purchases: Sites like Flickr, del.icio.us and Upcomming. Social sites which requires inputs from the users to have any type of content. And in the case of Yahoo, they even release the api of a couple of theses sites to encourages more user-driven content and tools.

Of course, for social collaboration, let's not forget the kings of them all: Wikipedia.

Web tools
Think about your basic application. Now think Web. Now think both. And you get web-apps. Sites like Google Maps or Yahoo Maps, but also sites like Meebo which is an IM client. Or complete Word processor like Writely, Zohowriter, Writeboard and Thinkfree office. Or little tools like voo2do, Ta-da list orBack Pack...

Anyway, time will tell if any of this will change the way we do things, but the web is never gonna be the same....

Update: Just as I had finished writing this post, slashdot posted this