Web 2.0 – What's that?

Tettnang, 27 January 2009 – It’s not a mega trend anymore, is it? Internet users don’t really seem to care too much about Web 2.0. Out of 13,414 participants in a survey on Avira’s website www.free-av.com 10,940 people are of the opinion that the Net hasn’t made any decisive developments recently. Their opinion is that “Web 2.0, Web 3.0 is nothing more than marketing talk.”

The second most frequently chosen statement was not very positive either: “No idea, I don’t really know what Web 2.0 means”, explained around nine percent (1,185 interviewees). Another group of 464 people (approx. 3.5 percent) were extremely critical, they said: “I think that the increasing targeting of specific Internet users is problematic, because the users' habits can be 'tracked', which means they can be monitored.”

Only 447 users are excited. They wonder if “the Web applications will really be more 'intelligent' and if they will be able to satisfy user demands depending on the user’s situation and context.”

The group of optimists is still very small: Only three percent of the participants think that the new world of the “semantic Web” sounds promising. Their answer: “I have high expectations for Web 3.0! The simplified searching of information through linked content and the additional information I would only obtain through very complicated research.”

“Web 2.0 remains a specialist topic that the broad mass of users have yet to understand”, says Rainer Witzgall, Executive Vice President at Avira. “Beyond blogs, i.e. apart from a small scene, there are very few discussions about the development of the Internet. Hence, the need for a great deal of awareness and education is still required.”