Technical Articles - 3: Web 2.0

Web2.0. We come across this word now and then in the Internet. When ever a CTO or some big head gives a talk, at least once he/she will use this word. What is Web 2.0?. Do we have any thing like Web1.0 and web 3.0?

The term Web2.0 became notable after the first O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. According to them web2.0 stands for ,
"Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform".

Here is an another definition for web 2.0 from First Monday.
"Web 2.0 represents a blurring of the boundaries between Web users and producers, consumption and participation, authority and amateurism, play and work, data and the network, reality and virtuality. "

So, Web 2.0 is a not a technology but a way of designing applications. We cannot even call it as a way of programming.

Returning back to O'Reillys statement,
Mr. O’Reilly characterized Web 1.0 through a set of static, one–way browser–based applications like personal Web sites and the encyclopedia Britannica Online, publishing, content management systems, and taxonomies. Subsequently, he distinguished Web 2.0 by associating it with the “new participatory architectures of the Web” that allow for online services such as the photo sharing site Flickr, blogs, the peer–to–peer file sharing standard BitTorrent, Wikipedia, event sites like Upcoming.org, the file–sharing service Napster, wikis (collaborative Web sites that allow for real–time editing), folksonomies (user–generated taxonomies), and the aggregation of online content through Web feeds.

The definition morphed considerably over time. Late in 2005 O’Reilly wrote that:
"Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications & [are] 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 ‘architecture of participation,’ and & deliver rich user experiences."

According to MichelZimmer's article in First Monday,
"Which technologies are commonly collected under the Web 2.0 umbrella? Evangelists of the phrase huddle technologies like the Web development technique Ajax , the Ruby programming language, CSS, RSS, OpenAPIs, wikis, blogs, mashups (digital media works that draw from already existing texts or audio), and podcasts (media files that are distributed over the Internet to be played back on portable media players) under its roof. They highlight user–friendly interfaces, activities like tagging, social networking and microformats as Web 2.0 descriptors"

To put it in my words, there is no restriction that only a particular set of technology can be used for web2.0.

(To be Continued)