Sky Click- Finally a mashup that actually “rings”

“Web 2.0” is a phrase that I’m beginning to loathe using these days. It is typical of most concepts in technology. At first, it is catchy and trendy to get hooked on to and talk about. Then, gradually from there, it goes to becoming mainstream to mundane and finally it gets so abused and its definition so far removed from what it was conceived to connote in the beginning that it starts losing appeal for serious technical usage. Yet, if one were to trace the history of the WWW and what the phrase Web2.0 was essentially meant to capture, it was the notion of the evolution of the Web from a repository of content to a platform of interlinked services. 
The beginnings of this could probably be traced to Dave Winer’s formulation of the SOAP protocol, which MS immediately latched on to and made the cornerstone of its .Net platform (or at least thats the way they marketed it). Of course, the phrase Web2.0 was still not invented back then, but critical pieces of the functionality to make the transition happen were beginning to fall in place. While this was going on, the other major parallel development that was taking place was this whole “social” and “user generated” phenomenon. Then, somewhere along the way, the two converged and it wasn’t too hard for someone like a Tim O’Reilly to come along and give the beast a name – “Web 2.0”. The tech community also contrived another novel moniker for such interlinked services – “Mashups”.