Guest Columnist

A term often used to mark the moment a technology moves from being a technologist's dream to real world adoption is the Tipping Point – after the book of the same name by Malcolm Gladwell. We have finally, after what seems like years of hyperbole, reached that point with Web 2.0. With any luck, this maturation will also mark the death of that awful moniker.

Sadly, I can't claim to have predicted that we'd reach the Tipping Point now. In fact, I didn't really expect it to happen for some time yet, but it hit me in the face last month when I walked in on my folks annotating a Google map of Europe with the photos they had taken on their recent trip across the continent. I was blown away. My folks don't know what Web 2.0 is, have never heard of SaaS, SOA, Ajax or even KML and GeoRSS extensions. But there sat dad, spectacles on the bridge of his nose, laptop open, digital camera connected, 3G card glowing blue, creating his own KML geo-annotations and attaching them to a map of Europe. With mom acting as creative director, they were linking photos to the places in which they had taken them and dropping little descriptions next to each. All they know and care about is that the family snapshot album is now online and can be shared with family scattered across the planet on a fancy animated globe of the earth.