Web 2.0 Introduction

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 didn’t happen overnight. It was a gradual shift from browser oriented content on the Internet towards application oriented content. Web 2.0 is basically Web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. It provides a more interactive platform to the user. Web 2.0 gives a more interactive platform to the users.

The concept of "Web 2.0" began with a conference brainstorming session between O'Reilly and MediaLive International. Dale Dougherty, web pioneer and O'Reilly VP, noted that far from having "crashed", the web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity. What's more, the companies that had survived the collapse seemed to have some things in common. Could it be that the dot-com collapse marked some kind of turning point for the web, such that a call to action such as "Web 2.0" might make sense? We agreed that it did, and so the Web 2.0 Conference was born.

Web 2.0 model by example:

It is interesting how the new ‘user centric’ model can be evaluated by drawing parallels between similar services during web 1.0 and web 2.0

So web 2.0 is the second generation of the World Wide Web, especially the movement away from static WebPages to dynamic, shareable content and social networking. It includes blogs, wikis, tagging services, content aggregators such as feeburner, etc.

The concept of Web 2.0 as deliberated at the conference can be summarised as follows:

User generated content is a very important part of the web experience so services such as Youtube, Wikipedia, etc are extremely popular and define the user centric model of web 2.0.

Some of the examples of web 2.0 services (by type) include:

Widget/Component: Feedburner, Zoho

Aggregation/Recombination: Bloglines, NetVibes, Snap

Collaborative filtering: Frapper, Last.fm, Digg

Rating/Tagging: Flickr, Youtube, wikipedia...