trapped in the paperless, wireless, timeless and spaceless office

We’ve all heard about Web 2.0 and how wonderful it is. Some of us even have lectured on it, but do we know what are we talking about?

Apparently a person who does is Tim O’Reilly the publisher of those thech books with animal drawings on the cover.

He’s written a paper which I would reccommend to anyone who wants to understand what Web 2.0 is (or to anyone that wants to bluff his way as a web guru).

While reading the article Lego came to my mind. Here’s some analogies between the concepts behind Web 2.0 and the Lego world:

• Personal pages become blogs where everyone can link to or comment: you can add your lego blocks to someone else’s lego model
• Services like Gmail or Flickr are permanently in beta state: a lego model is never finished. The owner can add blocks any time an make it better
• Users are treated like developers: If someone else has a lego block that can improve your model you can add it
• Design for hackability: everybody knows how your lego model works and it’s easy for them to modify it
• Make APis public: eveybody knows the top and the bottom of a lego block, so complex models can be built with someone else’s blocks

Tim O’Reilly’s article What Is Web 2.0 Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software.

Also interesting is the wikipedia article on Web 2.0, being wikipedia one of the most acclaimed projects on the Web 2.0.