While the number of published studies on the use of web 2.0
and social media in healthcare is rising, it is difficult to form a
definitive picture of social media usage in chronic disease manage ment.What can be agreed upon is that the underlying principles
are participation, communication, user-centeredness, collabora tion and openness [11,12], which were rapidly taken up to describe
a set of web 2.0 services, specifically for the provision of healthcare
[12].'Social media' are essentially the services that allow for the
principles of web 2.0 to be realized and examples include: Social
Network Sites (SNS), blogs, wikis, photo/video sharing services,
bookmarking tools and virtual worlds [4,6,13].Exploring the background
of web 2.0 provides a sounder basis for designing research, framing
arguments and interpreting study results.We know that the term was popularized commer cially in 2004 [9,10], to describe a new generation of the
Internet, modelled on a set of technologic, economic and social
trends.Foundations for understanding web 2.0 and theory behind
the term may be one of the reasons feeding confusion and creating
obscurity when exploring health effects of using 2.0 platforms.Definitive attempts to clarify the complexities of web 2.0 re main elusive.Deciding whether
a given platform is web 2.0 or an earlier 1.0 technology is where
the difficulty lies and is worthy of further examinationOf ten this confusion comes from how they differ from their web 1.0
predecessors.The lines are blurred [9].