The Web is moving towards a new direction. From simply being an information resource, the Internet is becoming a user-centric platform focused on the needs of users. As Newsweek in their recent cover said, this new phase is “Putting the ‘We’ in Web” (April 3, 2006 issue, pages 47-53) with the “Internet’s ability to empower citizens and enrich those who help with the empowerment.”
The Web is becoming deeply collaborative, allowing people to work simultaneously on the same tasks at the same time (example is project collaboration application such as BaseCamp). Many of the new success stories are riding on the powers of social networking (think the very popular MySpace.com); while others rely on user-driven content to create useful resources (great example is Wikipedia). The New Web has turned instant messaging into a crude application with the more powerful instant-voice-messaging and instant-video-messaging applications (Skype is a perfect example). It also allows for getting content here and there and mixing-and-matching them into unique content (Technorati puts together blogs and feeds in one easy to search site).
