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Software Industry Marketers have an interesting habit to coin new catchy terms and generate huge hype cycles around it. Web 2.0 is such a term with relevant substance but tremendous amount of hype surrounding it.
It doesn't help either that the hype around Web 2.0 and resulting mushrooming web start-ups remind us of 1999-2000 tech bubble and its subsequent burst, which burnt million of dollars of VC money and generated worthless penny stocks. As we discuss this, numerous Web start-ups in and around Silicon Valley is busy churning out new Web 2.0 applications. Many of these start-up ideas are focused around grabbing teenage-eyeballs, which is a peculiar user group with large amount of Internet usage time, but questionable online spending discretion. Is anyone talking of a wide-base business model yet? A critical look at these interesting web start-ups will force us to think whether these start-ups have the required differentiation, execution potential, broad-base user adoption and value-add to end-user that is necessary to sustain user interest and success in long-term. Are we witnessing yet another tech bubble? Let's take a look at various components and analyze.

Web 2.0 - Under the Hood

Let us take a brief look under the hood of Web 2.0 concept and then proceed to dissect the business strategy of these upcoming web start-ups.

The phrase Web 2.0 was coined by O'Reilly Media in 2003. It refers to websites, web-communities and services such as social net-working sites, wikis and folksonomies that facilitate communication, collaboration, information and data sharing between users.

Web 2.0 is an umbrella term for existing web technologies such as -