Leading Web 2.0 author Tim O’Reilly has suggested that the strong interest in Web
2.0 is driven by the concept of the Internet as a platform. O’Reilly sees future Web 2.0
applications delivering software as a continuous service with no limitations on the number
of users that can connect or how users can consume, modify, and exchange data.
Figure 10-27 shows examples of popular social networking sites, which are seeing explosive
growth in the Web 2.0 environment. Another form of social collaboration is called a
wiki. A wiki is a Web-based repository of information that anyone can access, contribute to,
or modify. In a sense, a wiki represents the collective knowledge of a group of people. One
of the best-known wikis is Wikipedia.org, but smaller-scale wikis are growing rapidly at
businesses, schools, and other organizations that want to compile and share information.
One of the goals of Web 2.0 is to enhance creativity, interaction, and shared ideas. In
this regard, the Web 2.0 concept resembles the agile development process and the opensource
software movement. Web 2.0 communities and services are based on a body of
data created by users. As users collaborate, new layers of information are added in an
overall environment known as the Internet operating system. These layers can contain
text, sound bytes, images, and video clips that are shared with the user community.