WHAT IS WEB 2.0?

You’ve probably heard the phrase “Web 2.0″. You may’ve even read some of the various definitions of it. And Web 2.0 does appear to mean different things to different people, so you would be forgiven for still feeling confused about the term. Here are some of the definitions of Web 2.0 floating about:

• Web 2.0 : The web as platform
• Web 2.0 : The underlying philosophy of relinquishing control
• Web 2.0 : Glocalization (“making global information available to local social contexts and giving people the flexibility to find, organize, share and create information in a locally meaningful fashion that is globally accessible”)
• Web 2.0 : An attitude not a technology
• Web 2.0 : When data, interface and metadata no longer need to go hand in hand
• Web 2.0 : Action-at-a-distance interactions and ad hoc integration
• Web 2.0 : Power and control via APIs
• Web 2.0 : Giving up control and setting the data free

Web 2.0 is all of the above things – don’t let anyone tell you it’s one or the other definition. More immediately, Web 2.0 is the era when people have come to realize that it’s not the software that enables the web that matters so much as the services that are delivered over the web. Web 1.0 was the era when people could think that Netscape (a software company) was the contender for the computer industry crown; Web 2.0 is the era when people are recognizing that leadership in the computer industry has passed from traditional software companies to a new kind of internet service company.

The bursting of the dot-com bubble in the fall of 2001 marked a turning point for the web. Many people concluded that the web was overhyped, when in fact bubbles and consequent shakeouts appear to be a common feature of all technological revolutions. Shakeouts typically mark the point at which an ascendant technology is ready to take its place at center stage. The pretenders are given the bum’s rush, the real success stories show their strength, and there begins to be an understanding of what separates one from the other.

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.

In the year and a half since, the term “Web 2.0″ has clearly taken hold, with more than 9.5 million citations in Google. But there’s still a huge amount of disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means, with some people decrying it as a meaningless marketing buzzword, and others accepting it as the new conventional wisdom.

Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn’t have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core. You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core.

The core competencies of Web 2.0 companies:

• 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 through customer self-service
• Software above the level of a single device
• Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models

Google was a pioneer in all three components of Web 2.0: their core business sounds crushingly hip when described in Web 2.0 terms, “Don’t maltreat users” is a subset of “Don’t be evil,” and of course Google set off the whole Ajax boom with Google Maps.

Web 2.0 means using the web as it was meant to be used, and Google does. That’s their secret. They’re sailing with the wind, instead of sitting becalmed praying for a business model, like the print media, or trying to tack upwind by suing their customers, like Microsoft and the record labels.

Sites like del.icio.us and flickr allow users to “tag” content with descriptive tokens. But there is also huge source of implicit tags that they ignore: the text within web links. Moreover, these links represent a social network connecting the individuals and organizations who created the pages, and by using graph theory we can compute from this network an estimate of the reputation of each member. We plan to mine the web for these implicit tags, and use them together with the reputation hierarchy they embody to enhance web searches.

One ingredient of its meaning is certainly Ajax, which I can still only just bear to use without scare quotes. Basically, what “Ajax” means is “Javascript now works.” And that in turn means that web-based applications can now be made to work much more like desktop ones.

The second big element of Web 2.0 is democracy. We now have several examples to prove that amateurs can surpass professionals, when they have the right kind of system to channel their efforts. Wikipedia may be the most famous. Experts have given Wikipedia middling reviews, but they miss the critical point: it’s good enough. And it’s free, which means people actually read it. On the web, articles you have to pay for might as well not exist. Even if you were willing to pay to read them yourself, you can’t link to them. They’re not part of the conversation.

What Makes a Web 2.0 Application?

Open Data

• Open data formats
• No data lock-in or walled gardens
• User created data
• User owns their own data
• Ability to use data outside the confines of the application
• Data used across devices

Rich User Experience

• Easy to use
• Pleasurable to use
• Build social networks
• Rich user interface
• Functions like a traditional application

Core Web 2.0 Technologies

• Open data through API’s and web services
• RSS
• Ajax
• Web Standards (DOM Scripting, XHTML, CSS)

ReferencesWhat is WEB 2.0? - By Tim O'ReillyWhat is WEB 2.0? - By Richard MacManusWEB 2.0 - By Paul Graham