The essential elements of Web 2.0

Dion Hinchcliffe: This is one of my more complete single views of Web 2.0 which I crafted last December. It remains one of my most popular as well and I get about one request a week to reuse it.

I personally like this visualization because it assembles a comprehensive picture of the elements of Web 2.0 and how they relate, including a backdrop with key examples. It does this in a way that shows the physical aspects of Web 2.0 and how they connect together, such as the people, visual front-end (RIA), Web services, and valuable content. The diagram also shows orthogonal, non-functional aspects such as customer self-service, user control, mass servicing of micromarkets, etc.

We'll use this visualization to continue our discussion of Web 2.0 strategies for the enterprise. Because some things are notably missing from this view of Web 2.0, if it represented a view of Web 2.0 in the enterprise that is. One of these is critically, enterprise-class security. Another is control over hosting models (behind the firewall appliance vs. external SaaS). There are more and that's the enterprise context that we'd like to understand as we continue.

So, when we get done working out the other missing pieces, I'll create a another view like this that represents Enterprise Web 2.0.

See Dion Hinchcliffe's blog, Enterprise Web 2.0.