Web 2.0

The term "Web 2.0" refers to a perceived second generation of web development and design, that aims to facilitate communication, secure information sharing, interoperability, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities, hosted services, and applications; such as social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs and folskonomy. This term first became notable after the O'Reilly Web 2.0 conference in 2004.
In the early, first stages of the worldwide web era, we would go to our computer, enter a web address and wait for the web page to come up. Of course, it was a little slower back then. We only had the capability to read the contents on a secure read-only web page.

Web 2.0 evolved from Web 1.0. So, the initial ideas became what we use today:
DoubleClick --> Google AdSense
Ofoto --> Flickr
Akamai --> BitTorrent
mp3.com --> Napster
Britannica Online --> Wikipedia
personal websites --> blogging
page views --> cost per click
screen scraping --> web services
publishing --> participation
content management systems --> wikis
directories (taxonomy) --> tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness --> syndication

etc...
The benefits of Web 2.0:
Today we can enjoy access to blogs, we can participate in podcast, we can download or e-mail all sorts of social and interactive activities, just like watching videos, communicate by using Google Talk, look for the information we need etc...

Resources:
- http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html?page=1
- http://ezinearticles.com/?Web-2.0-Benefits&id=1384842
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0

Web Tools:
1) Facebook
2) Google
3) Skype
4) Gmail
5) Firefox