What can the Web 2.0 do for you? A guide to a range of Web 2.0 services

As work, studies and business take us away from our families and friends, there is a longing to share our lives, dreams, interests and projects with people around us and those close to us but located away. A slew of Web sites have emerged recently to provide a platform for our social interaction needs.

Photo: Flickr is one of the most well known sites for sharing photos. Create an account (if you already have a Yahoo! account, then you can use it), upload your photos and invite people to view these photos. You can even take your photos on your camera and e-mail capable mobile and send it to the site as an e-mail attachment. It will be immediately uploaded. You don’t even have to be near a computer. The social and community aspect comes in from your ability to tag these photos (attaching keywords that describe the photo) and share the photos with the public.

Video content is increasingly moving online. Major search engines now allow you to search for video based on the keywords that describe these video clips. Portable video offered by the latest model of iPod has led to an avalanche of video downloads of movie trailers and TV shows. Video enthusiasts find that they no longer are bound by the movie and TV show timings and can watch their favourite programmes any time and on the move. Youtube remains the king of video where you can easily create an account and host your video.

Professional networking has also come of age – Linkedin hosts your profile that can be accessed by other members of this site. Members contact each other for mutual benefit. Ryze is another popular professional networking site. Zaabiz is a popular site for Australian and Indian professionals. For an example of a profile on Linkedin, check out my profile on Linkedin. It has a full resdume, recommendations and testimonials from former colleagues, links to my Web sites, applications or widgets that list my favourite books, slideshows and posts in this blog.

On a professional networking Web site, you can search for people and invite them to become your connections. As you increase your network, new connections become easier to make as you start receiving a number of invites. Facebook started as a student networking Web site but is now increasingly used for professsional networking.

Blogging is the cornerstone of Web 2.0. On the one hand are blogs that are fairly independent and their owners use the RSS and e-mail subscriptions to stream new content to subscribers of the blog’s feed. On the other hand are blogs that are part of blog communities and where the members can come to know about other bloggers who share similar profile or interests and belong to the same platform. Few of the common free online blog spaces are Blogger, Blogspot, Yahoo! 360 and MSN Spaces. Members maintain their own content but are part of a large community of bloggers.

Creating an independent blog with your own domain name (like this one of mine), own hosting and custom-designed to my requirements is not hard with platforms such as Wordpress, extensions in the form of plug-ins blog themes and widgets help you keep it fresh. If you have any queries, feel free to contact me. 

The list above gives a flavour of the new, useful, social Web that is arising. These sites are just some of the most popular ones. We have not yet even mentioned podcasting, tagging and other collaborative aspects. To get started with Web 2.0, simply register with a few Web sites, may be few of the ones mentioned in this article and start using them.

If you know of any other good Web 2.0 Web sites and services, please mention in Comments.

Originally published in my “Everyday Infotech” column in Indian Link, a leading community newspaper published in Sydney.

This article is a beginner’s guide to Web 2.0 services and social networking. I am working on much more comprehensive paper on how to use Web 2.0  and social networking for professional and business growth and will soon share with readers of this blog. Please send me any tips or suggestions via comments on this page.