Web 2.0 and Ajax
Wikipedia describes Web 2.0 as "changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aim to enhance creativity, information sharing, and collaboration among users. These concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies."
The term became notable after the first O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004.
According to O'Reilly, Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an "arcitecture of participation", and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences".
(Tim O'Really, "Web 2.0: Compact Definition?" O'Really Radar (10-1-2005), http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/10/web_20_compact_definition.html. Retrieved on 09-27-2008)
As specified by O'Reilly and Battelle, technologies tend to foster innovation in the assembly of systems and sites composed by pulling together features from distributed, independent developers.
O'Reilly provided examples of companies or products that embody these principles in his description of his four levels in the hierarchy of Web 2.0 sites:
- Level-3 applications, the most "Web 2.0"-oriented, only exist on the Internet, deriving their effectiveness from the inter-human connections and from the network effects that Web 2.0 makes possible, and growing in effectiveness in proportion as people make more use of them. O'Reilly gave eBay, Craigslist, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Skype, dodgeball, and AdSense as examples.
- Level-2 applications can operate offline but gain advantages from going online. O'Reilly cited Flickr, which benefits from its shared photo-database and from its community-generated tag database.
- Level-1 applications operate offline but gain features online. O'Reilly pointed to Writely (now Google Docs & Spreadsheets) and iTunes (because of its music-store portion).
- Level-0 applications work as well offline as online. O'Reilly gave the examples of MapQuest, Yahoo! Local, and Google Maps (mapping-applications using contributions from users to advantage could rank as "level 2").
Non-web applications like email, instant-messaging clients, and the telephone fall outside the above hierarchy.(Tim O'Reilly (2006-07-17). "Levels of the Game: The Hierarchy of Web 2.0 Applications". O'Reilly radar. Retrieved on 2006-08-08.)
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0. Retrieved on 2008-08-30)
The rationale behind Web 2.0 is captured by the following video by Chris Anderson, called “The Audience is Up to Something”.
It should be pointed out that Web 2.0 of is the evolution of the World Wide Web from a static content medium to a dynamic content medium. Powered by XML, formats such as RSS and ATOM are leading the charge in making a dynamic web. With the syndication format's, content is no longer tied to a single site, views now subscribe to a feed of the content with the aggregator of their choice. Web 2.0 allows users to share content without limits of the static web page. Where as in Web 1.0 you had to go to the data, in Web 2.0 the data comes to you.
- Separation of data and style
Companies who meet all of the following seven requirements are considered a Web 2.0 Technology company:
- Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
- Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
- Trusting users as co-developers
- Harnessing collective intelligence
- Leveraging the long tail (niche marketing) through customer self-service.
- Software above the level of a single device
- Lightweight user interfaces, development models, and business models
(Retrieved from http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html )
The commercial benefits of the Web 2.0 to a large extent stem from the concept of "long tail", which emerged in 2004. It refers to a long tail of statistical distribution, where the frequency of occurrences is lower, but the total integral amount in the tail is large, as illustrated by the plot below. In other words, it describes a situation when a large percentage of the market exists in small niche areas, outside of the mainstream. The user-driven contents allows the website to target the tail as well as the peak of the distribution.
The term "Web 2.0" was conceived in 2005 to describe a new breed of websites that use newer web authoring tools, are low learning curves (for the user) and support a collaborative environment usually free and usually just all done in a web browser (http://www.shambles.net/Web2/** ).
Web 2.0 represents a change in attitude towards how the internet is used, and is not necessarily a change in technology. It is basically a ‘remixing’ of older technologies into new. There are four basic applications of technology that make up Web 2.0, all centered on the idea of collaboration and communication. These applications are: social networking, wikis, folksonomies, and blogs.
Web 2.0 Technologies
- Social Networking
- Communication a place where companies, organizations, and small groups can share and collaborate on documents, ideas, and chat with each other to voice opinions.
- Online Diaries or (Blogs) - Personal journals have taken the Internet by storm. Frequently updated and written in a personal tone, a is a diary or journal where the writer or "blogger" will write her observations on the world or provide links to useful websites. Different bloggers write about different themes, sort of like a newspaper columnist but with no specialized necessary. The first blog is said also to have been the first website in 1992. Blogs didn't really start to take off until the late nineties
- Social Bookmarking-a method for a community to share common bookmarks . The most famous social bookmarking web service (formerly del.icio.us, pronounced "delicious") provides keyword categorization system in which users can each of their bookmarks with a number of freely chosen keywords (compare folksonomy ). It utilizes a web 2.0 technology called a tag cloud to show the hottest bookmarks for a certain tag ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Del.icio.us Retrieved on 09-02-2008.)
- Social Media-has becoming very popular over the past year. With the launch of YouTube, which is by far the most popular video sharing site, the concept of individual sharing home made videos has increased dramatically.**
- Map Based Applications