Is Web 2.0 All It’s Cracked Up To Be?

The real news story of the past few years has undoubtedly been the explosion of Web 2.0 websites. They may come in all shapes and sizes but underneath they all have the same characteristics – namely that they are sites which allow their members to help create them. The website creators provide the structure, the ideas and the tools, and the members provide much – if not all – of the content.This is a far cry from many websites online today, and indeed it looks to be providing something of a window into how more and more websites will operate in the future. Some sites are undoubtedly solely focused on the idea of being a Web 2.0 site, but others have taken certain aspects of it to help develop the more static site they started with.There is no doubt that a Web 2.0 site appeals to the search engines, since it is constantly updated and new content is being added all the time by the members. It can be a case of search engine optimization made easy for the site owners. But even with all those advantages, is it really as good as some people say it is?While the whole idea behind Web 2.0 is to link people together on a personal level and provide websites that are more interactive, there is no doubt that many marketers have exploited these sites to do a spot of a href="http://www.webprofitsglobal.com/">internet marketing. You might have read through the terms and conditions of some of these sites and seen that they don’t allow advertising for business purposes, but that hasn’t stopped marketers being creative and using them to funnel traffic towards their own sites.You couldn’t call Web 2.0 a failure in any sense, but some people would probably agree that the sheer number of these sites that are springing up all over the internet have started to dilute its power. It seems like everyone has at least two or three accounts with different social networking and bookmarking sites of one kind or another, and who among them doesn’t let some of those accounts founder after a while?The real winners here are probably ironically the people the sites were not aimed at in the first place. The marketers who are on the ball have been rather successful at increasing their profits as a result of the people they have found on Web 2.0 websites, and there is no reason to suspect that won’t continue for long into the future.Some people have voiced the concern that most of the people or ‘friends’ you meet and start following on these sites really aren’t friends at all, or even acquaintances. Could security be an issue going into the future? Some sites don’t make it easy to block those whom you don’t want any contact with, and yet safety and security should be paramount at all times online, regardless of the type of website you are on.It will be interesting to see whether the proliferation of Web 2.0 sites remains as strong in ten years from now, or whether something by the name of Web 3.0 will have arrived to take its place.