Mobile Design and Development

Chapter 10. Mobile 2.0

You’ve probably heard the term “Web 2.0.” Although it’s a commonly used term, most people you ask in the web business can’t tell you what it means. To put it simply, it is just a label for the second generation of the web industry. But more importantly, it is meant to denote a change in that what we now believe in and stand for, which is not as it was before. The suffix 2.0 in technology implies that a product is new and improved, reinvented to be better and maybe even more relevant.

In the 1990s, we saw the adoption of the first generation of web technology, allowing businesses to create websites focused on the consumer market at that time. The “dot-com boom” was not about the Web; it was actually more of a boom in networking computers via the Internet, mostly driven by desire to use email as a communication and productivity tool.

In the early 2000s, the Web found its own voice. Though the technology had only incrementally evolved, the production costs dropped at the same time the market increased, creating exciting new opportunities to increase communications and productivity. Personal publishing became simple and easy to do, allowing more people to share more information and new ideas built on common problems to gain wider traction and adoption. The result was a fundamental change in how we create products for the Web, including everything from how we code, to how we design, even down to how we do business.

A few years ago, the mobile community started to ...