Much has been said since 2004 when O'Reilly presented an article about novelties arising at that time in the world of the Internet related to the constant exchange of content based on social relations. What is known as the social Web or the much more commercial name of Web 2.0 began to be used to refer to all the services which mainly used the Web as the main interface and were based on participatory and/or dynamic Web sites.
The title of O'Reilly’s article pointed in a commercial direction: What Is Web 2.0. Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software, and presented Web 2.0 to refer to a second generation of the Web based on communities of users and special range of services, such as social networks, blogs, wikis and folksonomies. According to O'Reilly, Web 2.0 fosters collaboration and the agile exchange of information among the people who use it.
In contrast, voices against the new denomination argued that it was simply a commercial strategy to publicize certain companies and not an in-depth study of the reality of the Internet and that no qualitative leap had been taken in Web space.
What is certain is that change was gradual and around 2004 most services were based on what is now called a Web 1.0 structure: that is, infrequently updated, static web pages that did not allow interaction with users.
Whether a reality or the result of O’Reilly’s article and lectures and the millions of people who coined the term (an Internet search of “Web 2.0” gets millions of hits), it is certain that in the so-called first world we use information and communication technologies to carry out our social relations. Call it Web 2.0, call it the Social Web, call it whatever you want. Nowadays, we read information on the web written by users like us and we can collaborate, correct or subscribe to them. The fixed text and images of Web 1.0 have been expanded to include audio and video, Web sites that are updated without having to be reloaded, maps in motion… and it serves as a cultural and artistic platform for millions of photographers, video artists, musicians and artists of all kinds worldwide who find that Web 2.0 offers them a platform for making themselves known, where they can interact with what was formerly known as “the public” and has now become constant feedback.
The gateway to social communication on the Internet was opened by electronic mail in 1971. It was followed by chats and forums, first of all, and then a huge number of instant messaging and IP telephone communications services. With the advent of the so-called Web 2.0 came blogs, video on demand, wikis, and radio stations. Some of these services are free (as in freedom), such as the extremely popular Wikipedia and Menéame, as well as others that are not as popular. However, many popular services are based on proprietary software (see Web 2.0 table).
The title of O'Reilly’s article actually refers to the next software generation; it was not solely about Internet services over the Web. Therefore, it is clear that the business model is based on offering a direct service on the software, not the software itself, or even a software license. The software exists and serves as the basis of Web 2.0. O'Reilly’s article is also about the eminently social nature of services related to software. We will discuss each point separately.
Initially, social communication handled by cybernetic networks was multi-protocol in nature; that is, one could access it in multiple ways. For example, electronic mail has a variety of communication protocols (SMTP, POP, IMAP), with communication via the Web (Web mail) only one of these options, developed some time later.
At present, the fact that the majority of these services offer their sole communication interface via the Web has the advantage of making them accessible from any computer with a Web client, but the underlying drawback is that the user has no control over the software that is executed on a remote machine from which the user receives only the processed html, losing not only the source code of the programme with which the user is interacting but also access to the binary code.
Projects like Wikipedia have proved that the best way to build knowledge is when it is carried out collectively. Projects such as delicious or delirious show that the World Wide Web can be categorized, provided someone is willing to do.
This Web classification and indexing model is called the folksonomies model, which requires constant participation from its users. In what some voices are calling Web 3.0, this will no longer be the case, as the model to be adopted is based on folksonomies. It is what is called the Semantic Web. That is, until an automated classification becomes feasible technologically, the community of users will have to carry out that task, without being paid for it. Some have started to say that this is abusive.
The problem is that a large percentage of social web services are built on proprietary software, where users must grant rights to the contents produced to use the service, and are excluded from participation in the organization that manages the service. Users must use proprietary protocols and formats owned by the organization that manages the service and depend on a proprietary network. Consequently, large corporations maintain control of a large quantity of personal information as well as the social relations and links established on the web.
Free Web is a philosophy of the development and use of the Social Web or Web 2.0, where the users maintain control of the software, the protocols, the formats, the servers; of one's own network, of the social relations and of the content that is generated through them. A Free Web respects the freedom of the users over the service they use and so allows it to be used, studied, modified and replicated freely. More precisely, the following 5 or 6 freedoms are referred: