Over the last week I have been using both WordPress and Google Docs to evaluate both of them as a form of web 2.0. technology. Below are my findings from that evaluation:

WordPress is a powerful open source content management system – which most people use as software to run blogs – such as myself. It doesn’t take much technological skill to set up wordpress on a server, its just a case of uploading all the neccessary files, and then following an online installation process. As a web 2.0. technology WordPress ticks alot of the boxes, it is itself incredibly easy to use – you can set up a blog very quickly, start posting and set up a basic theme without much knowlege of the software itself and it isreasonably intuitive. It is highly customisable – but you sometimes do have to mess with a plethora of settings to get exactly what you want out of it. Another important feature is that WordPress ran sites all run reasonably similarily – and can incorperate RSS feeds for easy embedding of information. I personally like WordPress and I am tempted to use it on my own websites in the future if possible. I have read up a little on WordPress about security issues though – which is of a concern to me… adbots and other such malicious spamming and SQL hijacking is rife among sites that haven’t updated thier software as often as they should.

Google Docs requires the user to have registered a google account before you can actually access it – however once this free process is complete then the user has free access to all the software available. Google Docs comes with free versions of everything you’d find in something like the expensive microsoft student packages. Not only this but it also beats Open Office as all your work can be stored server side and you don’t have to actually download any software to make it run. This means it becomes a universal platform for you to access your data wherever and whenever you want. I find it very intuitive and easy to use – however I note it relys incredibly heavily on the standards of each form of office software that I have come to recognise over the years. There is a limit to how much you can store on the google servers, I think it is one gigabyte of data – but this is just to ensure that people don’t flood the service. Also a helpful addition is that google docs saves your work every few minutes as to prevent data loss. Google docs allows the user to save and download thier work in a variety of formats too which is incredibly helpful for users of it as a service.

In my opinion both of these web 2.0. services are impeccable examples of software as a service – not only are they both free to use, but they are easy and intuitive – simple yet highly customisable and very useful to most people with an internet connection. I will most definitely be using both these services in the future and hope that you will try them out too.