It’s Wednesday, which means that the release of Mac OS X Leopard is now less than 60 hours away! Today, I continue with part 3 of my award-winning Tiger-to-Leopard series (well, okay, it hasn’t really won anything, yet), where I take a look at everything that has happened during the 130-week interim between the releases of Mac OS X Tiger and Mac OS X Leopard. Today, I begin my focus on the Web 2.0, which has grown and matured exponentially since early 2005. Now, don’t get confused with the whole “part within a part thing,” but since I have quite a bit of Web 2.0 coverage to, well, cover, I’ll be stretching my Web 2.0 TTL coverage over today and tomorrow. Shall we take a look? (And yes, I promise that this post won’t be the laundry list you saw yesterday.)

Of course, when you think of Web 2.0, the first site you think of is YouTube. Apple may have started out in Woz’s garage, but YouTube started up above a downtown restaurant in my hometown of San Mateo, California, and even today, they now operate in offices about fifteen minutes north up in San Bruno, California (still in San Mateo County). The first public preview of YouTube came out in May 2005, shortly after Tiger had been released. In summer 2006, YouTube became one of the fastest growing sites on the web, with over 100 million videos viewed daily, and the speculation over their bandwidth charges was rampant until Google announced in October-November 2006 that they would be acquiring YouTube for $1.65 billion, which (at the time) was their second largest acquisition in Google history. And, early this year, Google/YouTube got slammed with a $1 billion lawsuit from Viacom, ending the phenomenon of Stephen Colbert YouTube clips.

Another of the big sites out there, the one Web 2.0 site that I never have nor intend to visit/use, is MySpace. MySpace was definitely in existence during Tiger’s release, and became the alive and kicking site for teens during that time and was just starting to appear in the radar scope of those “To Catch a Predator” folks around the time. Nowadays, MySpace has arguably lost a lot of its popularity in favor of newer sites (see below). In July 2005, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp bought MySpace for $580 million, and in 2006, launched a few international versions of the site, including for the UK and China.

However, when you talk about MySpace these days, you’ve gotta talk about Facebook. Although the first ideas for Facebook began originating by the founders in 2004, the group itself didn’t start getting invested in until May 2005. The first iteration of the high schools section came out on September 2, 2005. Since then, Facebook has steadily grown, particularly during the summer of 2007 after the Facebook “Apps” API was released. Heck, even I came on board (sort of)!

Digg, one of the many well-known Web 2.0 sites, was already in existence when Tiger was released, but since then, Digg version 2 was released in July 2005. You know that cool little “digg it” button? That was invented with Digg version 2; before then, it was a regular link that took you to a success page. Yeah, I know, old technology.
In June 2006, Digg went up to version 3, bringing with it more customization, more friends features, etc. Since then, Digg has never officially upped their version number, but they have seen a new user interface, new comments system, new Digg Labs sections, and much more to turn it into a very popular site.

Twitter is one of the more recent entries into the Web 2.0 fold. Their site launched on July 13, 2006, and its popularity spiked in early 2007, shortly after Leo Laporte moved to Twitter (and then later moved away from it). It’s now become one of the most addictive Web 2.0 sites out there, although it may seem to be based on a rather dumb concept, “What are you doing?”

Last.fm, although still slowly gaining popularity, has been around for awhile. In August 2005, the old Audioscrobbler website merged with Last.fm, and in May 2007, the site was acquired by CBS Interactive.

Flickr, too, was around before the emergence of Tiger, however right before Tiger’s release, Flickr was acquired by Yahoo! and in June 2005, they moved their data centers from Canada to the United States. Flickr also moved from Beta to “Gamma” status in May 2006, although 13 months later, they changed their logo from “Flickr GA

WordPress is one my tool of choice for blogging, primarily because it has the best user interface of any blogging tool that I’ve used. When Tiger was released in April 2005, WordPress 1.5 had only recently been released. 1.5 was notable for bringing along the modern themes system that WordPress uses. The free WordPress.com service went public (following a private beta period) in December 2005, and has sense grown immensly to become one of the most popular free blogging websites out there. WordPress 2.0 would also be released in December 2005, which brought along the brand new WordPress administration panel that we all know and love today. WordPress 2.1 would come in January 2007 bringing along auto-save, a new visual editor, and a number of interface changes borrowed from WordPress.com. WordPress 2.2 followed in May 2007, featuring built-in WordPress Widgets and other UI/speed optimizations, and the highlight of the year, WordPress 2.3 was released in September 2007, bringing along “Submit for Review,” Tags, update notifications, and plenty more. The infamous Akismet was launched in November 2005, and has since caught over 3 billion spam comments, filtering millions of these a day now. In addition, WordPress MU (Multi-User) was launched and went 1.0, and Automattic put on two WordCamps in San Francisco in August 2006 and July 2007, plus one in Israel which is taking place this week.

Unfortunately, phpBB3 did not get released during the 130 week interim from Tiger to Leopard, but The phpBB teams did make a number of accomplishments. The latest version of phpBB was 2.0.14 when Tiger was released; eight releases of phpBB2 have been released since then, bringing us to 2.0.22 (which was released in December 2006). In addition, five betas and seven release candidates of phpBB3 were released since June 2006. However, a number of other announcements took place in the last two and a half years. In July 2005, the MOD team updated the MOD Template, and in April 2006, launched the new XML-based MODX Template. The teams also launched Community Coding Projects in August 2005, and the MOD team did two rounds of “MODding’s Most Wanted” in December 2005 and July 2006. The teams also launched a brand new phpBB “Olympus” Bertie bear, and, of course, in March 2007, the teams launched their brand new website and unveiled the new ‘prosilver’ style.

Tags: Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, Mac OS X Leopard, MySpace, phpBB, Tiger-to-Leopard, Twitter, Web 2.0, WordPress, YouTube