To bring your site into the Web 2.0 world, you need to know about Ajax, ActiveX, RSS, and other key technologies.

As the intro confirms, this brave new world of Web 2.0 is supposedly all about appearances: “you ignore the new lingo at your own peril; enterprises that put up plain-Jane Web sites today risk turning away the more discerning browsing customer.” But it’s not just about AJAX. Oh no. It’s also about littering your site with pointless bling: clever developers “spice up content and make their sites more dynamic … Use polls, surveys, RSS feeds, and tag rolls.” (OK, I’ll allow them RSS feeds as important).

Only on page four of four is there a hat-tip to the idea that the way sites work with users might have the least importance: “I also include social aspects and smaller, lightweight components as keys to Web 2.0,” says Tony Karrer, the CEO of TechEmpower.

I have to assume that the piece was either poorly commissioned or subbed rather heavily, since the author, David Strom, is actually a lot better informed than this piece suggests.

Anyway, back to the point. No, it is not about AJAX. It’s not really about languages at all. You could write an application in fridge magnets and it could still be called Web 2.0 if it meets other criteria (lightweight models, perpetual beta, read/write access, collective intelligence, etc). Yes, a rich interface is also an important part of the idea, because that enhances usability — the human angle again, see? And those rich interfaces are something that AJAX facilitates. But that’s all it is, part of the toolbox. No-one, to my mind, has put this point better than Socialtext’s Ross Mayfield:

I’d bet the future is less the Matrix than Soylent Green. Less semantic fuzz than social discovery. Less artificial intelligence than human intelligence. Less automation and more augmentation.

Soylent Green is a 1973 Charlton Heston movie. At the end, he discovers that the new miracle food from the Soylent corporation is made of dead bodies. “Soylent Green Is People!” he bellows to an unhearing crowd in the last line. The same is true of 2.0 applications and sites.

Also a good excuse for some serious punnage: second coming, blessed be the tooltips, in the beginning was the CSS. (insert favourites below)

It’s not important for you to know my name -
Nor I to know yours
If we communicate for two minutes only
It will be enough
For knowing that someone in this world
Feels as desperate as me -
And what you give is what you get.

It doesn’t matter if we never meet again,
What we have said will always remain.
If we get through for two minutes only,
It will be a start!
(The Jam, Start!)

There’s nothing like statistical rigor when it comes to research. And my little poll here is nothing like statistically rigorous. However, it’s been sitting there for more than two weeks while readers patently ignored it and it’s time to talk about the results. Anyway, it seems that it is at least as valid as a lot of the polls you read in the papers.

It’s good news for the Web 2.0 guys. While they were the least popular of the three options I presented, they still managed to garner six votes. Since the combined forces of Yahoo, Microsoft and Google only managed ten, I’d call that a pretty solid presence.

“Yeah, right, Ian,” I hear you mutter. “Twenty-three votes is nothing, for a start. Plus you’re polling people who read a blog about Web 2.0 and stuff.”

True enough. However, my own expectation was the mainstream sites would completely dominate the newcomers, and that most people would vote for no personalised homepage. I use vanilla Google myself, but most of the time I’m actually going somewhere else, so “about:none” (which gives you a blank start page) would actually make more sense. Because of this bias, I assumed most people were the same. They’re not.

Netvibes apparently has at least four million users and recently attracted $15mn in seed financing. Leading competitor Pageflakes — backed to an undisclosed figure by Benchmark Capital — presumably has similar user numbers. New entrant Webwag will have fewer, having only just launched. It’s a rocky market, though: Fold.com ahem.. folded on June 3rd, becoming the first entrant to Techcrunch’s Web 2.0 deadpool. On the other hand, single page aggregators, like popurls, are also on the rise. These sites are similar in some respects to the Netvibes crowd, since they put together a bunch of related feeds onto a single page.

It’s pure speculation, of course, but the popularity of these pages might be ascribed to a couple of things:

1) It takes me an hour to read through the 107 111 blogs I subscribe to through bloglines. If I miss a day, it might take two hours. I don’t always have that sort of time. What if I could just get the important stuff on a single page? (cf. Ross Mayfield’s desire for a version of Techmeme that is actually MeMeme)

2) If I then need to visit a calendar, to-do list and a webmail site to complete my catch-up, that’s at least another 30 minutes. The personalised home pages can stick that on the same page as my news.

There are good reasons to use these pages. The question remains, though, as to how these sites are going to make any money. Netvibes, Pageflakes and Webwag haven’t even got any adverts. There’s talk of affiliate deals with Kelkoo, Amazon and so forth, but I see no evidence of that on the pages I’ve set up for myself using these services. Plus, there’s intense competition from mainstream players like Google as well as other AJAX homepage startups. Chris Lake raised this issue back in June.

If I were the boss of Google, Yahoo or MS Live — you know, companies that have (a) an existing personalised start page service and (b) loads of advertisers looking for inventory — I’d be looking very carefully at Netvibes et al. Then I’d copy whatever it is that they’re doing to attract so many users and try to shut them down. Wouldn’t you?

Charles Landemaine contacted me about Interaction, a text chat application that can be inserted into any web page. This AJAX product comes in three flavours. It’s free for the basic functions, but that includes advertisements. Professional and Enterprise variations on the service are available as a paid-for upgrade. These will remove the adverts, allow for multiple users and company customisation.

The service is intended for full screen operation, as opposed to some sort of side-bar widget. For this reason, it’s a lot more relevant for help and sales desks than it is for regular bloggers, who will be happy with some sort of meebo plugin.

Sceptics about anything that might be described using the expression ‘Web 2.0′ will be pleased to note that Interaction has (a) a genuine reason to exist that pre-exists the Web 2.0 boom; (b) a marketplace that goes well beyond the audience of digg and techcrunch and © a progression to solid revenues that scales quickly and doesn’t rely entirely on Google AdSense.

Again, this has been produced by college students. Intended for students, the site allows you to lay down your course’s structure and create notes, and also the beginnings of a social network, within that. There are a number of other PIM tools, such as bookmarking, a calendar and an address book.

The work they have produced is promising, if not at all finished. I wasn’t able to edit homework assignments, for example, and a couple of actions produced PHP errors. It also requires internet connections in lecture theatres, to be able to do the central task of making notes during lectures. Is this now the norm? When I went to university, the presence of girls was quite enough distraction as it was.

I’d have to say that this a crowded marketplace, in most respects. All the major educational suppliers in the UK, RM, Blackboard, Viglen, Microsoft, Capitas, Granada Learning and a number of others already have Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) solutions. mynoteIT might work, though, for informal groups of students, who can share notes.

While moodle and some other wiki solutions remain free, they are not nearly so easy for newcomers as mynoteIT.

(a) Describe your product offering briefly.

mynoteIT is a simple and easy way for any student to take, store and search through school notes and papers quickly and easily. You can also store all your professor contact information, keep track of all your current grades, be reminded of upcoming assignments and much more. A couple newer features are mynoteIT groups, which allows you to join class groups with other people in your classes. We also have workspace utilities, which allows you to find the definition of a word, or translate a phrase between languages instantly without leaving your workspace.

(b) What is your business model?

Our business model consists of ads from Google AdSense. We offer mynoteIT for free but we still have to pay server charges.

© How long did it take to set up mynoteIT and how much money did it cost? Any funding?

mynoteIT was first thought up and created in December, 2004. We only have two developers working on it right now (twin brothers, myself and my brother Justin). The only thing it costs is monthly server charges and a lot of time. So far we have not had any outside funding, but hopefully that will change.

(d) To what extent is this a Web 2.0 product?

Although “web 2.0″ is hard to define, the usability and functionality of mynoteIT make it more advanced than your normal website. For example, workspace utilities are use AJAX in your workspace so you can look up words and translate words without leaving your workspace.

(e) How many users will you need to make a profit?

We aren’t worried about making a profit from mynoteIT. Although both the developers are college students, we both have jobs and can pay server fees with what we have right now. We’re a lot more concerned with making school life easier than making a profit.

Is this a toy? Marc Fawzi, whose opinion I respect a lot, said that the radio app I talked about last week was a toy. On this… no, it is not a marketable product that you could charge for as a service. But I feel it’s a rough draft of something that could potentially get funding towards a bigger thing. Or be picked up by a major developer. Or at least, Alex and his brother could.