Web 2.0 & Social Media

The term "Web 2.0", popularised by Tim O'Reilly at the first Web 2.0 Conference held in San Francisco in October 2004, denotes a shift of the Web toward user-generated content, participatory platforms and rich applications built on asynchronous JavaScript. Jesse James Garrett's founding article on Ajax in February 2005, followed by the releases of Google Maps and Gmail, made tangible to the general public the new fluidity of web interfaces. The browser became capable of applications comparable to desktop software. The period was marked by the explosion of social networks: Facebook, launched by Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard roommates in February 2004, passed one billion users in 2012; YouTube, founded in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, was acquired by Google in 2006; Twitter, launched by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams in March 2006, popularised the short message; LinkedIn (2003), Flickr (2004), Reddit (2005), Tumblr (2007), Instagram (2010) and Pinterest (2010) completed the landscape. Wikipedia continued its collaborative growth, reaching three million English-language articles in 2009. On the infrastructure side, Amazon launched AWS in 2006 (S3 in March, EC2 in August), inaugurating the public cloud that abolished the entry cost for startups. Server-side JavaScript frameworks emerged with Node.js (Ryan Dahl, 2009), while jQuery (2006) dominated the client side. Git, released by Linus Torvalds in 2005, and then GitHub founded in 2008 by Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath and PJ Hyett, reshaped open-source collaboration. This era saw the user move from reader to content producer, monetised through targeted advertising and profiling. It established the practices of viral sharing, the "like", the algorithmic newsfeed and the data economy that would become structural. The arrival of the iPhone in 2007, announced by Steve Jobs, and of the Android Play Store from 2008, symbolically closed the desktop Web 2.0 and opened the mobile & cloud period in which social platforms would be consumed mostly on smartphones.