We live in the web

web1.0: we use the web
web2.0: we live in the web

The fundamental distinction of web2.0 is that the web is no longer a single user experience such as content search, price comparison, booking airline tickets, etc. Web experience now becomes a pervasive social experience, as long as there are user-to-user interactions or communities involved in site.

Social networks (myspace, facebook), social media (flickr, youtube), and social bookmarks (digg, del.icio.us) are obvious social applications for delivering social experiences. However, social apps are not necessarily fancy web2.0 inventions. In fact, some old web1.0 applications are extremely social. ebay is a community centric site where the feedback scores are its core asset in defending competitors (yahoo and amazon). Virtually all the online forums are very rich in social experiences, specially when the user starts to post and spends hundreds of hours in the community.

Web social experiences establish our virtual life in cyberspace. As we live in the web, web social experience is part of our daily life. Comparing to our physical social experience, which one is more "real"?

Believe or not, we live in a hyper-reality in that the artificial reality may seem more real. Watch out, our social life is engineered by social apps whenever and wherever we live in the web. Achieving healthy outcome from "social engineering" with best possible commercial gain, however, is not an easy task, if not impossible.