What is Web 2.0? do you think you know ???
What is Web 2.0?
If that is your first time to hear this term and you don’t know the answer then you probably very focused on what you do today and not thinking what you should be doing tomorrow
And for those of you who know the answer, I can assure you that it’s not limited to the flying stuff, the instant responses, the light interface, and definitely it’s not the Ajax components alone.
Web 2.0 is a concept, not a particular language, technology, or a program. It’s a design patterns and business models for the next generation of software that will be running as a service.
To see the difference between what was Web 1.0 and what is now being called Web 2.0:
Web 1.0 is the first popular peak of the web, which was mostly about commerce. Many dotcoms got founded; it was about HTML; as a standard for presentation, dynamic sites powered by local databases, content sites with editors in the background, portal managers trying to fill their product with data that would make their portal *rich*.
While Web 2.0 refers to a new peak, current one, that leveraged the rise of networked applications. The idea is that you don't install applications on your local machine, but instead it is run via the web. Because web became the platform, not the OS, not the browser, such applications include:
wikis, weblogs, photo/video sharing sites, Live.com, gadgets, Gmail, Gmaps, social bookmark managers, social news networks, and more.
Because these applications are on the web, a dimension of community can be added:
An example is the bookmark manager del.icio.us that uses the community to tag and categorize websites for them.
Flickr uses the community to tag and rate photos.
Wikipedia uses the community to write an encyclopedia.
Digg uses the users to share and rank any kind of news
These are all web 2.0 examples of applications.
I just came back from the Web 2.0 conference that was held in San Francisco earlier this month, and I can see clearly that we have a great new opportunities to grow into that direction if we have the required focus and clear vision on what we want to do, what brought us here at the first place and where we want to be.
Web 2.0 sites and solutions are those that integrate all the things that were missing from Web 1.0. They include the different concepts and functionality:
- Better user participation including user generated content, user voting, user submission and sharing of content (i.e. community submitted and edited news sites like Digg.com).
- Syndication that allows information from a web site to be easily extracted and used on other web sites and in other programs (i.e. RSS and the Feedburner web site).
- Tagging data and media to make it easy to find (i.e Flickr, Youtube, and Technorati).
- Improved usability that enables the web to give users a similar experience to desktop programs.(this is the AJAX, ATLAS part)
- Open technology standards that allow information to be easily shared across web sites (i.e. XML, RSS, API, etc)
Web 2.0 is about making Internet technology seem less like technology and more like an intuitive human interface available anywhere, anytime, and with very little latency.
So let’s put the Ajax part in context and clear the confusion that Ajax is web 2.0: white it is just a mix of programming languages and styles that implies that parts of the web page will update automatically without reloading the entire page. Technically, this means that the page typically has JavaScript that rewrites part of the DOM (document object model) to cause the browser to update a part of the page.
So to sum it up, Web 2.0 is about:
- Collective intelligence or the User-Self-Services where the more the users using your service, the more the service becomes smarter
- User Generated Content: if your product is based on content generated by editors, you will not sustain and eventually your product will die or becomes expensive to operate and maintain, the user can produce more content than all the editors you can get (think of bloggers, videos, music, photos, etc..) all the types of content and media that the user can upload to your sites.
- Social networking, where everything is cross-linked, a user get his own homepage,
- Long tail: you build your product, you release the APIs and the web services for the public, the users start building their applications based on your APIs and webservices.
- Cross devices applications: build your application to support all devices from the beginning
- Open, use your users to grow your product (mass collaboration)
- All of that wrapped (tied together) with an intuitive, smart, lite interface (the Ajax interface), so Ajax is the how not the what!!
Web 2.0 is an attitude, culture, concepts, not a technology, not a technical term.
Examples of Web2.0 (think of concepts not interfaces) some of the sites you may already knew, but try to map the above with what you see there: