A lot of people have been speculating about what makes a site “Web2.0” and I have been putting together my own conception of it. I think that what is different about Web2.0 sites is not necessarily the content, AJAX, novelty, domain names with dots everywhere, or rounded corners and gradients. Instead, the most successful candidates are (a) extremely supportive of the two main purposes of interacting with the web and (b) incorporate two new factors that don’t exist on pre-Web2.0 sites.

The two behaviors people exhibit when going on-line are either gathering information from or contributing information to the web. Gathering is both searching for information and storing it so that you may find it again later. It is a selfish thing, all about consuming and using info for your own needs. Contributing is about actions such as blogging, participating in forums, commenting, collaborative filtering, and sharing content like photos and videos. It’s all producing and sociality.

I made the suggestion a while ago that Google = Information and Yahoo = Community, but you could also interpret that as Google = Gathering and Yahoo = Contributing. I ran across another Google/Yahoo comparison that implied that gathering and contributing are opposing behaviors and there is even a gender bias for one over the other. In my opinion the gender difference is mainly in which behavior you believe will benefit you the most on a personal level.

But, the behaviors are not exclusive of each other. I believe that they are flip sides of a coin and the best sites support them both at the same time. Useful pre-Web2.0 sites (such as Google and Yahoo) already cater to these behaviors in various degrees, but that’s just not enough. What makes a site Web2.0 is two factors that have really been the catalysts for the changes in our expectations of interaction with a service on the web: Metadata and Portability.

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