Web 2.0

It's one of the biggest buzzwords out there, but what exactly does it mean?

Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O'Reilly Media in 2004, refers to a supposed second-generation of Internet-based services that let people collaborate and share information online in previously unavailable ways.

As used by its proponents, the phrase "Web 2.0" refers to one or more of the following:

• The transition of websites from isolated information silos to sources of content and functionality, thus becoming computing platforms serving web applications to end users
• A social phenomenon embracing an approach to generating and distributing Web content itself, characterized by open communication, decentralization of authority, freedom to share and re-use, and "the market as a conversation"
• A marketing-term used to differentiate new web businesses from those of the dot com boom, which due to the bust subsequently seem discredited

Many find it easiest to define Web 2.0 by associating it with companies or products that embody its principles like eBay, craigslist, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Skype, dodgeball, and Adsense. Flickr, Writely, iTunes MapQuest, Yahoo! Local, and Google Maps and non-web applications like email, instant-messaging clients and the telephone.

While interested parties continue to debate the definition of a Web 2.0 application, some suggest that a Web 2.0 website may exhibit some basic characteristics. These might include:

• "Network as platform" - delivering (and allowing users to use) applications entirely through a web-browser.
• Users owning the data on the site and exercising control over that data.
• An architecture of participation and democracy that encourages users to add value to the application as they use it.
• A rich, interactive, user-friendly interface empowered by Ajax.
• Some social-networking aspects.

Commentators see many recently-developed concepts and technologies as contributing to Web 2.0, including weblogs, linklogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds and other forms of many-to-many publishing; social software, web APIs, web standards, online web services, and others.

Proponents of the Web 2.0 concept say that it differs from early web development (retrospectively labeled Web 1.0) in the sense that it is a transition from static HTML Web pages to a more dynamic Web that is more organized and is based on serving Web applications to users.

Proponents of the Web 2.0 approach believe that Web usage has started increasingly moving towards interaction and towards rudimentary social networks, which can serve content that exploits network effects with or without creating a visual, interactive web page.

The complex and evolving technology infrastructure of Web 2.0 includes server-software, content-syndication, messaging-protocols, standards-based browsers with plugins and extensions, and various client-applications. These approaches provide Web 2.0 with information-storage, creation, and dissemination capabilities that go beyond what the public formerly expected of websites.

What Enabled Web 2.0?
Bandwidth and power. Cable and DSL hookups have given high-speed connections to small businesses and home offices. In addition, the entry level computer has become powerful enough to execute programming scripts in an HTML page without any noticeable delays.

A Web 2.0 website typically features a number of the following techniques:

RIA, or rich internet applications such as Ajax, Adobe Flash and Flex have evolved that can improve the user-experience in browser-based web applications. The functionality of Web 2.0 rich Internet applications builds on the existing web server architecture, but puts much greater emphasis on back-end software.

The second piece of Web 2.0 is SOA or service oriented architectures. It's one of the key pieces in Web 2.0 and includes buzzwords such as feeds, RSS, web services and mash-ups. SOA allow Web 2.0 applications to expose their functionality so that other applications can leverage and integrate the functionality, providing a much richer set of applications, including mash-ups.

The Social Web. Web 2.0 applications tend to interact much more with the end-user. The end-user is not only a user of the application, but is a participant, whether it's by tagging the content, whether he's contributing to the wiki, or doing podcasts or blogging. The social nature of these applications is such that the end-user is an integral part of the data of the application, providing feedback, allowing the application to leverage the users that are using it.

Over time Web 2.0 has been used more as a marketing term than a computer-science-based term. Skeptics suggest that it means whatever its proponents want it to mean in order to convince their customers, investors and the media that they have begun building something fundamentally new, rather than continuing to develop and use well-established technologies.

The competitive opportunity for new entrants is to fully embrace the potential of Web 2.0. Companies that succeed will create applications that learn from their users, using an architecture of participation to build a commanding advantage not just in the software interface, but in the richness of the shared data.

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