Recently, there have been so many new websites being set up, claiming to be the latest in what the web has to offer. Mostly, these sites dub themselves to be "web 2.0", a seemingly ubiquitous tag that no one has offered exact specifications on yet. As far as it has gotten to, even O'Reilly and Associates not placed a solid definition on it but rather endeavored to describe what it "feels" to be like and made several comparisons between what they perceive as Web 1.0 companies (e.g : DoubleClick, Ofoto, etc...) and the new Web 2.0 players (e.g: AdSense, Flickr, etc... )
Now, there are hundreds or even thousands of new players who are looking to becoming the next biggest thing to hit the web. Popular areas that have been explored are photo-hosting, video-hosting and creation of web-based sites which mimic desktop productivity software (think Writely and Thumbstacks).
In some sense, the main underlying feel to what the next generation of websites should be (from the general standpoint) along the lines of being fast, user-friendly, smooth, provide a rich user experience and having a large user base. All these translate into having to move fast to be the first player in a certain field and capturing the lion's share by offering services and features that make a difference to web users. In majority of the cases, these services are free to gobble up the market share first.
However, this draws question to the substainability of these business models. Most are heavily reliant on advertising revenue coupled with a large user base. Failing to high a critical mass of users will badly hinder this model. In the developmental order, most of the web has shifted from a "charge-the-users" model to a "charge-the-advertisers" model.
I'm guessing that there will be the emergence of a new form of revenue model for the web soon.
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