To start, Web 2.0 emerged in the early to mid-2000s, marking a significant turning point in technology and, of course, interaction design. It really started the shift from static webpages to interactive, user-generated, socially networked experiences.
You might be wondering why exactly Web 2.0 is so important, and one of the reasons it is so important is that it introduced more user-generated content. Easy examples of this are blogs, comments, uploaded photos and videos, editable profiles, collaboratively editable pages, and more. Now that we are in history that I myself existed in, I can literally remember how huge it was that people could have their own accounts on blogs. Gone were the days were websites were “read-only.” Now, with Web 2.0, things were becoming “read-write.”
Another really cool feature that came out of Web 2.0 was the fact that you could actually have a social presence online and interact with other users. Platforms now started to have to support commenting, replying, liking or rating, tagging people and objects, following/friending, sharing, and more. The web became social, and network effects started to matter more.
Web 2.0 also brought with it the new features of real-time or near-real-time updates. Before, pages reloaded entirely after every action, but now with Web 2.0, live notifications were introduced along with continuous content feeds. Interactions became fluid and dynamic instead of just being page-based.
As mentioned before, Web 2.0 also brought a whole host of new interactions to work with. Crowdsourced reviews like Yelp, crowdsourced tagging like Flickr, and collaborative knowledge banks like Wikipedia were all introduced during this time. Users could now have much more of a hand in actually building the websites they interacted with, meaning things just got a whole lot more accessible. Not only this, but embedded multimedia was introduced, making blogs even more interesting to engage with.
Now you might be thinking, how is this different from today? When you look at all the features I’ve mentioned, chances are you can imagine them in your mind being in use today, but in reality, tech truly has grown a lot, and not everything holds up or looks exactly as it did then.
For example, one easy difference we can point out is the fact that AI-powered interaction is brand-new, and it is here. Modern interactions today can include personalized feeds powered by ML, chatbots and conversational AI, predictive search recommendations, and more.
Another difference we see today that strays from Web 2.0 is that now we can seamlessly switch between devices, such as phone, laptop, and watch, even. Also today, we have location-aware interactions that we can see in our map apps, and we now have touch, gesture, and voice input. With the invention of the iPhone and all these other products resulted in the web becoming ubiquitous and context-aware.
And that’s not all! There are even more features that we have now today, like AR/VR, voice assistants, interactive livestreaming, algorithm-driven discoverability, and more.
In the end, Web 2.0 was so revolutionary for technology, especially for us designers, too. It brought with it a whole host of new jumping-off points for interaction and engagement, and it is the reason why we have such high-fidelity technology today. Sharing and creating have not been the same since, and I would argue we all have Web 2.0 to thank.