My Version.

Ever since the first web site was built on August 6, 1991 the world has never been the same. Every company in the world has since then been jumping over one another to get their presence on the Internet. Websites were popping up one after another, corporations being set up with the aim to provide everybody a new way to shop. So every VC worth his weight in $100 dollar bills was backing anybody with a .com in their last name.

Well, that didn’t last too long as we all know. Beginning 1997 all the way upto 2001 they kept popping and many shut shop, sold or scaled down their operations. Some of the start ups like amazon, ebay, yahoo, netscape among others did survive. Why did that happen? Well mostly they built, but they didn’t build a sound foundation. Money wasn’t all that they needed – they forgot about the customer, which just wasn’t ready to shop online yet, infact they were frightened of the very thought!

People were just taken to fast and to quick into a digital world they didn’t understand. Web 1.0 was a fast paced race to make as quick a buck as possible and it did not work. As people became more accustomed to a digital world and they understood that shopping online can actually be safe they came back, and online sales have been leaping by bounds and leaps since 2001. But the only limitation was that the sites that were to succeed still needed a huge amount of capital behind them and an ongoing marketing strategy. The bigger players ate up the smaller ones, then someting began to happen.

YOU became important, independent and began to express how you wanted to be treated as a customer. Customer satifaction and online behaviour was hardly studied prior to setting up those multi-million dollar webpages. Now you became more important, software was being written just to study what people actually did with their little mouses how you moved, how you viewed, how long you were on a page and more.

Pretty soon mom and pop business started to well ‘pop’ up and it became so easy to have a website that it started a whole new revolution, of a user driven internet. Blogging and Social Communities started springing up and people started connecting with one another. These events brought about more interaction and the web began to open up, you no longer needed to be a hard core programmer or web designer to have a presence on the web. Now it was easy to set up an online site, tell people a little about yourself add a few sponsors and boom generate revenue even if you didn’t have anything to sell.

Moving forward Web 2.0 is going to be about the user. Many people, blogs, forums, personalities say it’s a bunch of technologies that will make it more interesting. Sure technology is great but NOT if nobody uses it. You can create the coolest looking map interface built to zoom into your shop from space and show your goods live if you need to but if nobody really cares about a cool zooming feature you won’t sell many…of anything really.

If you are in the online business and are aiming to become a Web 2.0 branded site.

First things first, get the color lime green, orange or bright blue somewhere in your webpage anywhere (you can completely ignore this step if you feel).

Second, get a blog incorporated into the frame of the site.

Third, get a feed going and have people subscribe to it.

Fourth, have users interact, comment and let them share it with people they know.

Fifth, make it easy and fun to use.

The list goes on. But those are the top five steps that you can take to make your online presence more Web 2.0′ish.

The internet as we know it is going to change considerably as the past year or so has shown. Ideas are now no longer needed to be backed by multi-million dollar campaigns all you have to do is be original with a little bit of luck behind you. If you can convert a million pixels to a million dollars, try to trade a red paper clip for a house, sell the numbers 1 to 1000 as art, make a roll of stamps into an experiment and many more ideas out there you can achieve anything. Welcome to Web 2.0.

At least that’s what I think. How about you?

About the author

Hyder has been blogging for the past two years on this blog. He started Weborithm, his web company, in 2007 and along with designing blogs and websites also releases various web related products.