You are online and wanting to book your flight tickets.  The process typically goes as follows.  Type in web address.  Press enter.  Wait.  Airline website loads.  Choose departure airport from dropdown.  Choose destination airport from dropdown.  Choose number of passengers.  Press “show flights”.  Wait.  View flights.  Choose flights you want outbound and inbound.  Press enter.  Wait.  If you make a mistake you’re back to the start and if you want another flight you’re back to the start.  Is there a better way?  Can we make a sequel?

This customer experience is adequate.  And because we have no experience of anything else we are content with it.  In fact, a lot of research has gone into airline booking websites over the years and many of them are now very well optimised to make it as easy as possible to book.  Because of the findings of this research, many airline websites are similar, and their booking systems are almost identical.  Competitors in the airline industry are dealing with the same technical parameters, and so might assume that commercially there is no further revenue to be enjoyed by reworking their booking engines.

Web 2.0 is challenging all of this.  The phrase “Web 2.0” has yet to be defined fully but in short it covers the phenomena of intelligent software being available through the web.  Google is pioneering a range of projects which bring the power of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and even mapping programs straight to your computer screen using the web.

In the past five years Google, Yahoo and MSN have all been expanding their web based email packages to include functionality which we are more used to seeing in MS Outlook.  Hotmail allows you to manage not only your emails, but also your to do list, your calendar, your address book and general notes and documents.

37 Signals, a US based company, have been leading ground–breaking web based project management and personal time management software through their Backpack, Campfire and Writeboard products.  This hugely successful venture succeeds by renting their software to consumers for as little as $5 per month.

Web 2.0 is the next phase of Hotmail, of GMail and of Campfire.  To see it in action, take a visit to Google Maps at http://maps.google.com/.  You can use Google maps to get a view of major Irish & UK cities and connecting roads.  But you can also drag the map which shows you your new location in real time, and without the need for downloading plug ins or installing Flash.  Or take a visit to Kayak, and type in the first few letters of your departure airport – see how the site intelligently pre–fills your potential airports, and see how it filters the list of possible destination airports.

But these examples are just the start – Google has just recently acquired a product called Writely, which is a web based word processor requiring no downloads or installation and which simply runs in your regular web browser.  Similar products are available, such as Ajaxwrite and Zoho Writer, which can read, manipulate and save MS Word documents.

Do these advances represent a real commercial opportunity, or just a new set of toys for web geeks to play with?  Probably the answer is both – it all depends on how the technology is used.

There are real challenges which Web 2.0 evangelists face, such as storing confidential documents on shared web servers, security, the ability for big brother to watch you as your write your Word documents and the fact that you need to be online to use Web 2.0 (what was wrong with MS Word?).  On the flip side, pioneers such as Hotmail and Campfire have demonstrated that there is a real and vibrant market for people who have overcome their concerns and are content to run mission critical distributed computer systems over the web and for a rental fee.

So the jury is out on Web 2.0.  The success of the technology will depend on how focussed we remain on its commercial benefits – for sure there may be some mistakes along the way, but I believe that these will merely be growing pains as we explore and benefit from the new world of online distributed computing.