Is social networking really web 2.0?

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Ever since 2005, experts say that social networking and video sharing is web 2.0. People have been been using the internet in ways they haven't been doing when the dot com boom took off in the 90s. Others say that it is not web 2.0 becuase it still uses the same technology.


What do yo think?

...that people will say anything to get attention... not you; them...

Technology always winds up with 'off the label' uses for new capabilities. I think of it more as a refinement and an explosion of connectivity. Twenty years ago there were BBS's where people would get together to communicate. The tool works better, but the job is the same. At least that's how I see it.

Web 2.0 is the technology.

Social Networking is a particular application of that technology.

We use a lot of Web 2.0 functionality to write embeddable updatable banking systems - but it's not social networking.

Humans have had social networking since they evolved from an earlier hominid.

Homo Sapien is the Ape that Talks and Gossips.

ruveyn

Web 2.0 sounds like a phrase that is hard to define; after all, you can't re-invent the internet.

"Web 2.0" is a very nebulous phrase, I think, which describes a spectrum of patterns in web application development.

I gather there are distinctions in implementation and use. The content is typically more engaging of the user, allowing users to modify existing or submit their own. From a technical perspective "Web 2.0" seems to be distinguished by its need to enable this interactivity. So, increased occurance of postbacks, asynchronous JavaScript, or Flash applications to communicate the user's input to the server.

With it defined, I would say social networking sites are certainly "Web 2.0" and were even to an extent responsible for the trend.

On the other hand, I might see a "Web 2.0" case for a JavaScript widget which, say, printed the current time or weather from a remote server based on IP address lookup, but accepted no input at all from the user. The widget is actually less user-interactive than some "Web 1.0" content, but from an implementation perspective it would be very similar to the highly interactive content which non-technical users attribute to "Web 2.0".

You could re-invent the internet, but making new protocols, changing how information is transfered or even what that information is would lead to some to even drastic changes in people's hardware / software and if you changed it enough you would even have to have new land lines or another medium in which the information is sent and received.

Would the V-DSL lines be an example?
Is there any chance this may actually happen with all of the data being constantly exchanged each day?

To me it seems a valid possibility...