Web 2.0 Television

If you're a Web 2.0 startup, you need 'em. If you're a Web 2.0 user, you're sick of 'em.

1. Gradients.

Last.fm, an online music player and prediction service, has a great example of gradients (colors that fade into one another) in its logo and home page:

Note the two gradients - white to red for the background, and pale gray to darker gray in the foreground.

2. Round edges.

Round edges show that you're cool. Windows doesn't have round edges. Macs have rounded edges. Linux has do-it-yourself edges.

TaskAnyone shows us how it's done with a home page made up completely of rounded edges. Good work, folks - here's a pair of safety scissors for you to cut out your award!

3. Drop shadows.

Drop shadows give your company logo more depth, and your PC less time to play Halo 2. 

Rollyo, a service that lets you create your own search engine using sources you select, is so 'too cool for school' even its signup button has a dropshadow.

4. Reflections.

Reflections are big. They show that your logo extends to infinity - and that you can use Photoshop.

3Bubbles is a chat service that adds real-time chat to blogs and other sites (sorry, it's not chat; according to them, it's conversation intelligence). Their logo shows us reflectional intelligence:

4. Big fonts.

The bigger the font, the simpler the Web 2.0 application is to use. It's like going back to kindergarten and being fascinated by those big alphabet blocks.

You remembered to upload, tag, and make those blocks available through RSS, right?

Jotspot is an online collaboration app. Its descriptive tagline is bigger than its logo:

5. Pastels.

Pastels show that you're counterculture, non-corporate, and take your own path - till you're bought out, at which point you're still pastel, but with stock options.

Mashable, a blog covering social sites and Web 2.0 startups, has gone so pastel it looks like a page from the 1980s Preppie Handbook: