Popular russian business newspaper for people, who come to St.Petersburg, has published an interview with Andrei Dobryi, CEO of Portal Design Group. Discussing theme - Web 2.0 innovation Internet projects in Russia and Saint Petersburg, it’s level, opportunities and features. Text according interview listed below.

St. Petersburg is preparing itself for the simultaneous release of several projects in a revolutionary new format — Web 2.0. Over the last two years the latter has become increasingly popular, both in Russia and abroad as it begins to attract the interest of key investors and funds.

The key difference between Web 2.0 and its predecessor, Web 1.0, comes down to the fact that content can now be generated by the user himself, whether it be for a blog-type service, social networks or a videoportal.

At ‘.ru’ websites there are altogether nearly twenty Web 2.0 resources, but it should be pointed out that many of them are imitations of their Western equivalents.

And although in St. Petersburg such projects are for the moment limited in number, players on the city’s web market are predicting the active development of this trend over the year ahead.

What is Web 2.0?

The appearance of the term Web 2.0 is related to an article by Tim O’Reilly, “What is Web 2.0?” published in September 2005. O’Reilly is considered one of the founders of the OpenSource movement and is head of his own publishing house, responsible for more than half of all classical computing literature currently available.

In the article O’Reilly explains the appearance of a large number of sites sharing several principles, as part of the general tendency for the development of Internet society, and called this Web 2.0, as opposed to older tendencies – Web 1.0.

Irrespective of continuing disagreements among experts as to what this term actually means, those who admit the existence of something called Web 2.0 identify several basic aspects of its form.

The familiar resource structure of the standard net Web 1.0 implies the availability of some kind of manager, who allocates the content of its resources for other users who receive this information unilaterally.

The main difference in Web 2.0 resource comes down to the fact that here the users themselves create their own content. The number of such users is defined by the informational value of the resource.

Orientation through this information is helped by key words through which the search service gets rid of unnecessary content.

In this way, the new Web transforms users of the Internet from a passive, anonymous mediator into an active public participant.

Standard Web 2.0 resources involve a blog service, social networks through which users interact on the basis of some characteristic that unifies them, and also RSS-ribbons and wiki (an online means to structure letters from multiple authors, a characteristic example being Wikipedia).

Web 2.0 includes resources allowing the allocation of media files to users (photos, video, music). Something else related to this is podcasting: the word coming from a combination of iPod and broadcasting and means broadcasting on portable audio players using RSS channels with links to audio recordings. Ultimately, podcasting is a blog made up of recorded mp3 files.

The classic way of using the standard Web 2.0 is the so-called mash-up, or the integration of various services. For example, by integrating a real estate web site with Google Maps one ends up with a new, more convenient service, which a user can use to see the exact location of each respective property on the market.

On top of semantic differences, Web 2.0 services should be distinguished by their simple and agreeable design and a minimum of graphics, which almost completely exclude flash and gif animations and other complex technologies.

Interactive applications are created using Ajax, RSS, SOA, CSS, XHTML, Atom and other technologies.

Web 3.0 on the Horizon

While use of the term Web 2.0 still provokes controversy among web specialists, Western programmers are already working on new technologies that will allow another web revolution.

Most specialists agree that the logical step from Internet documents linked together (Web 1.0) and linked information through the Internet (Web 2.0) will be the so-called ‘Semantic Web’ (Web 3.0) or World Wide Database.

Web 3.0 allows the creation of systems that give the clearest and most in-depth answers to difficult requests, saving users from analyzing a whole host of resources by themselves.

And for the moment, allowing for a number of skeptical enunciations, the popularity of Web 2.0 projects is an indisputable fact.

In 2006 the Western social networks My Space, You Tube and Facebook were successfully expanded.

The apotheosis of the popularity of these networks was the purchase of YouTube for $1.65 billion, suggesting that such projects are becoming more and more attractive to investors.

Web 2.0 became popular in Russia quite recently and is still underdeveloped: many projects are in the stage of beta testing, while their business models are equally insufficient. For the time being Russians use foreign Web 2.0 services like gmail.com, livejournal.com and others.

At the moment, the more popular Russian projects are being developed by programmers in the capital – resources such as blogus.ru (rating blogs on the basis of visitor numbers), moikrug.ru (a social network for professionals linked to information technology and the web), dirty.ru (one of the first collection of blogs, which appeared in November 2001), habrahabr.ru (news and blogs service for IT specialists), comby.ru (an analog to the foreign blog service MySpace), news2.ru (news portal, equivalent to the foreign digg.com), russianpodcasting.ru (podcasting project) and others.

All basic Russian search engines have also contributed to the active development of Web 2.0 services, for example, Yandex recently released its own RSS reader and finder among Runet blogs.

As far as St. Petersburg is concerned, the city lags around two to three years behind the capital in terms of the development of Web 2.0 services, and the amount of similar local resources are limited to single figures.

The first project on the horizon is probably the portal Free-lance.ru, which presents itself as a system of cooperation between employers and freelancers working at a distance.

The first pilot version of the portal was released in mid July 2004. However, as the project’s programmers have remarked, for the moment Free-lance.ru is only trying to comply to the Web 2.0 standard while gaining popularity among users.

25,000 users are currently registered, with more than 10,000 individuals visiting every day.

According to the head of the Free-lance.ru project, Anton Mazhiriin, deals made using the site worth a total of $3 million were concluded in 2005 – last year the number was at least three times bigger. The well known companies that searched for freelancers using this service include Mail.Ru, DP.ru, Defa, ‘Araba,’ Stockholm School of Economics and Mamba.

In the autumn of 2005 the creators of Free-lance.ru announced two new services – 10Mpx.ru and Syem Ruk (7ruk.ru), which were posited as Web 2.0 projects.

10Mpx.ru is intended to let photographers use the site to sell their work. The idea of Syem Ruk (seven hands) is based on a theory that everyone is known to one another across seven handshakes. In this way, Syem Ruk is a social network (a well-known federal equivalent is moikrug.ru or Moi Krug) and allows relations to be established between shared acquaintances.

Last month in St. Petersburg another portal was launched, claiming the title of the city’s first news portal in Web 2.0 format and called SP5.ru. The portal’s content takes form under the active participation of its users, who become united by the resource.

The creators underline the non-commercial character of the project and see it as unique, at least for the web market in St. Petersburg. The portal is currently available as a beta-version.

Those involved with St. Petersburg’s web market agree that in the local segment of ‘net.ru,’ the Web 2.0 services currently available are limited, linking it to the way St. Petersburg typically lags behind Moscow in the realm of IT technology.

Nevertheless, the directors of the city’s studios claim they have started work on projects related to Web 2.0 resources with several of them due for launch this spring.

According to Andrei Dobriy, general director of the Portal Design Group, “Most consider Web 2.0 to be a combination of a certain-styled design, clear usability and services, inducing people to create ‘unique content.’ Precisely the quality of this last aspect is what interests and is demanded by users.”

“In my opinion, there is currently no local Web 2.0 resource. It would be an exaggeration to label the latest initiatives coming from the Gorodovoi and SP5 portals, for example, as Web 2.0 resources,” he continued.

However, I am confident that the first Web 2.0 resource will appear in St. Petersburg sometime in the spring,” Dobriy said.

He also confirmed that the Portal Design Group is working on a new version of the popular city portal, cityspb.ru, which will be maintained in the ‘sleek’ style of Web 2.0.

“It will be a bigger service than a portal and more customization than information,” said Dobri.

Andrei Ryabikh, general director of the web studio Web Master.Spb, agreed that “apart from blogs, there are no fully-fledged Web 2.0 projects in St. Petersburg.”

However, he did say that there are more and more projects being done in the style of Web 2.0.

“In this sense, Moscow is normally two or three years ahead of us, although even this year will see the appearance of a few local Web 2.0 resources, one of which is from our own company,” he said.

“Typical Web 2.0 projects include 7ruk.ru, and Free-lance.ru, as well as online services allowing one to add one’s own information and use new technology such as Ajax, and, sometimes, to use several services together to create a more convenient product (the so-called mash up),” said Yuri Stepanov, general director of Peterlink Web.

“We are always ready to integrate the Web 2.0 ideology into projects that fulfill the needs of our customers if that is a necessary condition for success,” he said.