New technologies -- and new ideas -- are helping to shape the Internet into what some are calling Web 2.0. MySpace.com, ThinkFree.com, and Digg.com represent a wave of dynamic sites that take full advantage of new models of collaboration. Today's Web can facilitate sharing as easily as it can accept your blog about what you ate yesterday, upload your vacation photos, or post your book review on Amazon.com.

In addition, shrink-wrapped software, traditionally installed one disc at a time on individual machines, is in danger of becoming a late 20th-century anachronism. On the evolving Internet, software is becoming a service, not a set of products -- similar to buying a seat on a flight rather than owning an airplane.

"The key to this new business model is the idea of creating, of being a part of an ecosystem with others, delivering services and content that will be remixed," says David Cearley, vice president of emerging trends at the technology-research firm Gartner.

The online world of the near future promises to fundamentally alter our perception of the Internet from a static, two-way tool for information and commerce into a thriving, virtual, global community. To understand where the Web is headed, a look at its past -- and the intentions of its inventors -- might be in order.

Content Conquers Community

Some of the pillars of Web 2.0 -- social networking, user-generated content, and software as a service (SaaS ) -- draw on some of the Web's oldest values. "In the early days of the Web, and the Internet before that, it was very much a platform for sharing," says Phillip Evans, a senior vice president at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

The early Internet's reason-for-being was largely to enable information-sharing and collaboration among researchers. Many early Web sites were designed to share information of all kinds.

Then came the tech boom of the 1990s, a period that could be likened to the Big Bang. Venture capital seemed to rain from above, and the number of sites on the Web expanded almost instantaneously. Suddenly, the research-oriented universe of the Internet had to accommodate a host of other purposes such as entertainment, e-commerce, and online dating. (continued...)

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