Making sense of the Web

Back in 1993, I was hanging out in Palo Alto, CA with an awful girl and her classmate, a tall kind of nerdy Chinese guy who was a PHD candidate at Stanford. We kind of hung out and we used to go to this Denny's right there on El Camino. He would endlessly babble about technology and all I wanted to do was get him to say a few nice things about me to his cute classmate! He was telling me that he was going to make a "sales" pitch to a bunch of people the next day and he wanted some help with the projector. I had to fly back to NYC for work so I told him good luck. The next day must have been good cause he told them about a new breed of people called Venture Capitalists and the start of something called the Internet. He went on to create one of the most powerful web portals in the world. My friend Jerry started yahoo.com.

Now that we are fast approaching 20 years of life with the internet, we can forget about the days of dial up internet, signing up with aol and watching the time since we paid by the minute, don’t have to get a second phone line or even imagine that every single page on the internet cataloged through yahoo was done through good ole fashioned manpower! 

One thing that has greatly changed the way we view the internet in the past 3-4 years is something called web 2.0.  Purists think we are still on web 1.0 but for the sake of this article, lets call it web 2.0.  So what the heck is web 2.0? 

Web 1.0 introduced us to the internet.  We still had dial up modem pools, categorized and looked at web pages full of information and sometimes, the flash sequences would even make us ooo and ahhh.  Web 2.0 take things a little bit more direct to you.  I can talk about the different types of technologies involved in 2.0 but the easiest way to know this is, asking yourself this.  Do you have a facebook account?  Myspace? Twitter? Blogged?  Congratulations, you are a member of the 2.0 family.  Simply put, web 2.0 is more interaction. 

We see 2.0 type application everywhere on the internet now.  Whether it is writing a review on a product you bought from amazon.com or you are updating a status on facebook through your iphone or blackberry, you are passing along a ton of information about yourself.  This is kind of cool.  You can follow what your favorite rap artist is doing by subscribing to their tweet, or you can even keep u p with what our President of the US is doing by viewing his myspace, facebook OR twitter accounts. 

Interaction is fast and simple and cool  and the best thing about it is it can be as real time as you want.  I can find out my friend Sherman just bought his Porsche in Taiwan or I can tell the world I crashed my motorcycle all from applications built into my own phone.  But along with this fun, we can be bringing in more and more interesting people into our lives.  Ever heard of the guy who posed as a girl to meet up with a kid?  Or the lady who acted like a boy in high school to prey on the emotions of a girl?  The 2.0 world exposes us to a level of people we never would have imagined. 

But how do we know whether our children are creating a safe facebook profile or myspace profile or not?  Got a couple of tips to making sure the 2.0 is a good place to be.  While giving out information is fun, you have to be selective of the fun!

• Never reveal your name or any specific details other than to say you live in Hawaii.
• Never give out your age.  Cause as you get older, people make fun of you anyways!
• Don’t give out phone numbers or email addresses on any of your profiles.
• Pay attention to what your children are doing on the computer!
• You can download software like K9 web protection and this will help you out a little bit too.  Oh, its free!
• Add your own profile to your kids profile and you can keep an eye out on their “friends”.  Ok, this is a little bit paranoid but.  You just never know!

Web 2.0 is here to stay and there are other types of virtual worlds showing up every day!  There are many ways to make the 2.0 experience a fun experience but at the same time, because of the speed of information travelling around, you just have to be a little bit more careful!  Remember, this is the world wide web and though it is a good avenue for free marketing and advertising and a host of other solutions, things that should be private should always be kept private!