Friday, October 06, 2006

Pew Backgrounder: Riding the Waves of "Web 2.0"

More than a buzzword, but still not easily defined

"Whatever language we use to describe it, the beating heart of the internet has always been its ability to leverage our social connections. Social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and Friendster struck a powerful social chord at the right time with the right technology, but the actions they enable are nothing new. A trip to the Geocities homepage on the "Wayback Machine" circa December 19, 1996 (courtesy of The Internet Archive) yields this decidedly quaint statement from the company: "We have more than 200,000 individuals sharing their thoughts and passions with the world, and creating the most diverse and unique content on the Web."7 Replace "200,000" with "100 million" and you could almost imagine this sentence appearing on the MySpace homepage."
Source: Pew Research Center

Link to online report

No comments: