Cool things that were in web2.0

Last week I listened to a John Gruber interview with Tom Watson and Daniel Agee, the founders of the photo sharing app Glass. They talked a lot about what it was like during web2.0, including some of the cool things that got developed in that period.

I enjoyed the brief trip down memory lane, an oasis of calm amongst the current madness all around. I spent a few minutes making a list of some of the things I remember, and enjoyed wondering how some of these types of technologies and trends could blend with things in web3.0.

Here’s that list:

Rocketboom, Ze Frank, and videoblogging
Citizen journalism
Creative Commons licensing
Crowd funding
Community events and meet-ups
The Maker movement
3D printing
Photo sharing
Video streaming
Online maps and navigation
Blogging and RSS
Live photo feeds from events with photos displaying on your desktop as they are taken
Journalism integrated with data analysis tools
Social media
Newsrooms integrating social media into their broadcasts
Wikipedia
APIs everywhere
Web services - AWS, Azure etc
Podcasting and podcast tools
Open source hardware
Open source software
Github repos and actions
Bit torrent for sharing assets with listeners to collaborate on
User Generated Content
Live video streaming mixed with forum/chat rooms with bots that trigger video and audio overlays when events like tipping occurs
Gifs
Memes
Newsletters
Weird one offs that never took off like Chat Roulette

Some of these were around before web2.0, but got very popular during web2.0 and arguably some were developed more recently but IMO feel very web2ish. Nonetheless when I think about web2.0, these are some of the things that come to mind.

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