Instead of giving Vanity URLs away for free, like it did last weekend, Facebook originally planned to auction them off to the highest bidder.
Facebook’s first idea was to auction them off in a standard “ascending” auction, where the URL and user name would have gone to highest bidder at the highest bid. The problem there was Facebook would have had to close millions of real-time auctions in a very short period of time, creating a tremendous load on its servers. Facebook also worried about giving wealthier users advantages over poorer ones.
The older generations of the Internet users have witnessed the evolution of the Internet and World Wide Web from the mid 80s. The younger generation was lucky enough to take the full advantage of the next version of the Word Wide Web or Web 2.0 which is the next step over the first version of Web.
Web 2.0 has many significant differences over its predecessor. In the previous version of Word Wide Web, the website sponsors were in total control of the content. Most of the content were static and later became dynamic with the advancements of the technologies. With the introduction of Web 2.0 the end users of the web sites were given the authority over the content, so they are the authors, editors, and publisher of the information in the website. This way, the sponsors of the website reduces the overhead of maintaining the content while; many users are attracted to the website as it can be customized by the users.
After reading the above paragraph, doesn’t it cross your mind that this concept is best suited for social networking? Yes, social networking is a brain child of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 adopted many recent trends due to the advancements and demands of social networking. Therefore, social networking platforms such as Facebook became one of the first experiments of Web 2.0.
If you go to Facebook, all what you see is Web 2.0 features giving the end users more flexibility over the content they maintain.
