Rudelle Blogging

According to Wikipedia, Web 2.0 is a referring to a supposed second-generation of Internet-based services that let people collaborate and share information online in new ways, such as social networking sites, wiki, communication tools, and folksonomies.
Sounds familiar to you? Finding the ultimate Web 2.0 definition has been an exciting challenge for a number of so called web experts for the last 18 months. So far, most definitions say more or less that Web 2.0 is user centric or is giving power back to users, and so on.
But now, one question: Which is the only application which already answered this criteria back in 1999 and which represented at that time a community of several tens of millions users? Answer: Peer-to-Peer networks!
Not only these P2P applications are nothing but social networks, but they meet perfectly a number of economic features of Web 2.0, in particular low production cost of the service. Moreover, it is the very reason why P2P services managed, while being developed in garages without any VC money, have achieved such massive success.
But as these services P2P suffer from legal weaknesses, it is difficult to use them as examples of the great web 2.0 revolution. For the time being, nobody has found the miracle (and consensual!) solution to make P2P as legal as any other mainstream application. It is a pity, because by its community approach, P2P could have been at the edge of the Web 2.0 new wave. With by the way, the same Long Tail challenges than for e-commerce sites: these P2P tools are really effective only if the user knows what he is looking for. But this is another story.