Web 2.0
Once upon a time, there was a man named Euclid. Euclid had a point. According to Euclid, “a point is that which has no dimensions”. Therefore, the period after this sentence isn’t technically a point since it has dimensions. However, it is the best representation we can make of a point. The point was lonely and so it made connections with another point by the shortest way possible, a straight line according to Euclid, which is defined as the set of all points on it. Of course, the “l” in front of "line" isn’t technically a line because a line has only one dimension and would only have lenght and not width. Now, the two points are happy because two is company. However, when we add a third point, we have a crowd.
Two points can have only one straight line between them, but three points can have three. Increasing this to four points gives a maximum of six possible straight lines between them. Increasing the number of points results in a further accelerated increase in the number of possible lines between them, and then we have something that looks kind of like a web.
Nevertheless, we do not need to go beyond three in this introduction. Isaac Newton had proposed that it was impossible to completely solve a three body problem, but Henri Poincare found certain three body configurations that were at least stable even if they were unpredictable. This was the basis of chaos theory which extrapolates the three body problem to many more points than three. Eventually, chaos theory proved to be a very successful way of describing our world. In fact, Albert Einstein’s Nobel Prize winning work was on Brownian motion which explains chaos at the atomic level. (It was NOT for relativity.)
Towards the end of the Cold War, there arose a double edged situation. The iron curtain was crumbling and the world was starting to shrink. People’s lifespans increased as did birthrates. This brought an increased necessity for interaction between points, and a solution was sought and found. It was Web 1.0.
Web 1.0 was an attempt to bring structure to the chaos that is the Web. It was survived initially simply because less points meant less lines which meant less chaos. However, it soon grew totally out of control as people got all kinds of wrong ideas about how to tame this monster they have created. Eventually the bubble burst.
Web 2.0, on the other hand, is a very different approach. Unlike the comparatively structured Web 1.0 applications, Web 2.0 thrives on chaos. The more chaos the better. Wikipedia has open editing of almost all articles on it. Google offers free information very quickly. Mapquest produce maps based on user requests and give detailed directions between places. The Weather Channel’s webpage gives updated weather hourly. Mozilla Firefox is free to use, and being open source, has various addons that enhance the web browser.
Web 1.0 tried to control the chaos, including the people in it, and failed. Web 2.0 does not even try. It becomes part of the chaos and thrives because, according to the second law of thermodynamics, over time, the entropy (chaos) in a given system can only increase. Passage of time is tied to increase in chaos. Resistance to chaos is as futile as stopping time.
Therefore, my benchmark for Web 2.0 is its adaptation to chaos.