There’s been a lot of headlines about Web 2.0 recently, and at least one person has asked me: “What does all this 2.0 stuff mean exactly?”. With the dot com “bust” still a recent memory, a lot of people have proclaimed it more Internet-hype—and there is no denying the 2.0 moniker is pure marketing—but if the web becomes so ubiquitous people take it for granted, isn’t a little reminder of how much better things are now than they were in say, 1999, a good thing?

Anyway, here’s something which I think sums up why the web deserves a large bump in version number. During the Apple product announcement yesterday, practically every Mac-related website was swamped with traffic, yet I was able to watch a minute-by-minute summary at http://www.macrumorslive.com/ (sadly disabled after the event so you can’t see just how cool it was). Sure, webpages that automatically refresh themselves at a set time interval have been around since web 1.0, but this page didn’t refresh (the whole content), it updated with only the new information: no annoying flicker as the whole page changes, no wondering whether the server will be completely overloaded during this refresh so you’ll have to manually interveve, and it even had a little ticking clocking showing you how long until the next refresh so you knew how much time you could dare to avert your eyes for! It’s a shame there isn’t a demo available, but for the techies amongst you, there are some details of how it works.