“Set your Conversations Free with Skype”

In the past few years, “Web 2.0” has become a popular buzz word carelessly thrown around by techies and users alike. I cannot claim to be a techie, so as a humble user, I embarked on an internet journey to find a clear definition of the term. Despite finding myriad sources of information on the topic, a succinct definition of the term continued to elude me. I have come to conclude that the term “Web 2.0” is better described, and not really defined. Tim O’Reilly’s article entitled “What is Web 2.0” does an excellent job of describing this new generation in the web-based community. There are a few aspects of what he describes as Web 2.0 that stand out to me. First and most importantly, Web 2.0 is different from its predecessor, Web 1.2, in that it focuses on collaboration and sharing between users. The ever-popular YouTube video on Web 2.0 infers that the “the web is us” i.e. we, the user, are now the web. The title of that video also plays on the word, “Us” by referring to it as follows: “The Machine is Us/ing Us.” We, the user, are being “used” in the this new generation of web-based community to create infrastructure, create information, upload it, download it, discuss it, collaborate on it, share it, organize it, and the list goes on. As O’Reilly indicates, users become co-developers whose collective intelligence is harnessed. He refers to this as “an architecture of participation to build a commanding advantage.” This facet of the Web 2.0 community goes beyond users simply pooling information – the architecture of user participation can, in some applications, go so far as to create an information infrastructure that utilizes “the processing and networking power of the end-users machines” (http://www.skype.com/download/explained.html) instead of centralized resources (“P2P” technology). The idea of P2P or “Peer-to-Peer” technology is that the available cumulative bandwidth for an application grows in direct proportion to the network of users. This aspect of Web 2.0 is sometimes referred to as the “platform power of the internet” (see http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2006/11/17/web-20-summit-opening-session.html).

An application that embodies the user-network collaborative aspects of Web 2.0 is the popular internet telephony application, Skype. Skype was founded in 2003 by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis and is software that provides the services of internet telephony along with instant messaging, file transfers, and video communications by using your computer and internet connection to communicate with anyone, anywhere in the world. An article by Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service, 11/08/06 entitled “Web 2.0: Skype upgrade to get smart new features” indicates that Skype currently has about 136 million registered users in 200 countries, and adds around 250,000 registered users every day. Skype uses P2P technology and, therefore, the available resources for this application grow with the number of users. In fact, Tim O’Reilly at a Web 2.0 Summit pointed out that Skype only has 12 centralized servers as opposed to Google's hundreds of thousands of servers. But, as a Web 2.0 network-collaborative application, Skype, can either have its 12 servers, or infinitely more depending on however many users are online! In fact, Skype was recently acquired by eBay, in part, to expand its (eBay’s) global presence by automatically gaining a foothold on the PCs of millions of registered Skype users who already have Skype as a desktop application, but may never have heard of eBay (http://blogs.zdnet.com/web2explorer/?p=8). Talk about Web as a community platform! The global reach of the 12-server Skype, and now, perhaps, eBay piggybacking on Skype, would never have been possible without the network community and the distributive infrastructure of P2P technology, all aspects of this new Web 2.0 generation. So, in conclusion, I am going to borrow Ken Ronkowitz’s definition of Web 2.0 from his blog, and simply say that “Web 2.0 is what the web is becoming.”