Web 2.0 yet to enthuse Indian Internet users

The potential is huge, but the adoption is low. Most Indian website majors and users appear to be reluctant to embrace the second generation of the Internet, populary know as Web 2.0.

Although the concept has been floating around for nearly 2 to 3 years in the country, there are only an estimated 180 websites using this platform""a meagre number-compared to the millions of portals on the old platform (Web 1.0 as it is referred to).

The term, Web 2.0, was coined by American media firm O'Reilly Media in 2003, and refers to the next generation of Internet communities and hosted services. A Web 2.0 site contains rich text, media and applications that are user-generated.

The surfer also plays an active part in driving traffic to the sites. Users log on to the sites and cast their votes, and the number of page views decides the importance of a page.

Several Web 2.0 startups, however, have managed to get venture capital in the foreign markets and underatken studies to understand the market potential of Web 2.0 sites. One of the challenges, though, plaguing Web 2.0 in India is the creation of content.

B Mathew, founder of talkingtarmac.com, a Web 2.0 site for the aviation industry, says, "The technology or features are almost free or cheap. But the real issues are creating awareness - and persuading-traffic to sign up and participate.

"In India, the a majority of surfers use the Internet for a specific purpose like email or chat - and convincing them to become active participants in a site requires an excellent understanding of the userbase," says Matew.

The youngsters are much more open to active participation in a Web 2.0 site, Mathew adds. Mirroring Mathew's sentiments, Yo4ya.com director Rehan Yar Khan says: "We are not a country of content creators, but content watchers. Hence creating user-generated content (UGC) is becoming an issue."

According to Rajiv Dingra, who runs two Web 2.0-related sites WATconsult.com and WATblog.com, Web 2.0 is the next generation of websites.

"Interactivity is the key element of these websites," he says. However,he concurs with the orhers that content generation could be a problem.

The technical component of Web 2.0 is often, though not necessarily, AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML).

AJAX enables websites to reduce page download times by just refreshing a relevant portion of the web page in response to user's actions.

The other component of Web 2.0 is user generated content (UGC) and active participation in the website. However, these benefits are not reflecting on the increase in usage of Web 2.0 sites in the country.

Avnish Bajaj, founding managing partner, Matrix, said: "Web 2.0 is a whole bunch of things. It has new technologies like Ajax, user generated content (UGC) and an user engagement model."

He added that it will be easy for a company to enter into this space as the technology, to a large extent, is available free of cost.