Web 2.0: At the tipping point

The idea that the Web is transitioning to a new era is grounded in real examples

Google, too, keeps an acquisitive eye on promising startups. It shook up the blogging world in 2003 by purchasing Pyra Labs, a small venture that developed the popular Blogger service, and later picked up photo software developer Picasa to jump-start its photo-sharing services. In May, Google acquired Dodgeball, a mobile social networking venture that lets cell-phone-toting users locate nearby Dodgeball-registered friends.

Dodgeball's founder, tech developer and analyst Dennis Crowley, began toying more than five years ago with ideas about connecting cell-phone users through social networking software. When he and his partner Alex Rainert officially launched Dodgeball in mid-2004, the service quickly built a base of thousands of users in 22 U.S. cities. But had Dodgeball gone live a few years earlier, Crowley doesn't think it would have been as successful.

"Early on, it was so hard to get people to try things. No one was using their mobile Web browser; you couldn't text-message between carriers. A lot of those things are starting to resolve now," he says. "I joke that one of the points where we knew Dodgeball was going to work was when my mom started sending me camera-phone messages, because it was easier than calling me. If my mom has this stuff figured out, then you know it’s ready for prime time."

Google helped warm up the crowd. Its two-year-old Web mail service, Gmail, blew away the competition in bringing desktop-like functionality to an online application. (The heaps of free storage Gmail offers has also helped it build a huge, fervent customer base. Google doesn’t disclose its Gmail user count, but analysts estimate it's in the millions.)

Gmail user Matthew Amster-Burton had muted expectations for online applications. He'd been frustrated before by other Web mail services, but Gmail quickly hooked him -- and from there, his Web reliance snowballed.

"After realizing how much I liked Gmail, I became open to the idea of using Web applications instead of desktop apps or post-it notes," Amster-Burton says. A food writer based in Seattle, Washington, he's adopted what he jokingly calls a "Web lifestyle."

While ubiquitous Web connectivity and powerful applications can ease users' lives in previously unimagined ways, breakthroughs require lots of experimenting -- and failure. The new technologies also carry new risks. Security is an endless concern, but so are plain old outages. The more a user entrusts essential data to Web applications, the more at-risk the user is when those applications fail.

As if to underline that point, a group of Web 2.0 poster children suffered a quick succession of crashes during a one week-long stretch in mid-December. Blog hosting service TypePad went down for an extended stretch after a failed storage upgrade, while del.icio.us users endured days without their online bookmarks after a data-center power loss wreaked havoc with the site. Hosted sales software provider Salesforce.com Inc., a well-known evangelist for "on-demand" enterprise software systems, crashed for a day because of database glitches, enraging customers who were rushing to close sales deals before the end of the year. Problems persisted into the new year.