Some items about WEB 2.0

Composed by Galina Vitkova

In order to make our debate more vivid and more animated I am appending several items about Web 2.0.

The term “Web 2.0” became known after the O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. According to Tim O’Reilly:

“Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. “

Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not propose any update to any technical specifications. It is rather about changes in the ways software developers and end-users utilize the Web.

Nevertheless, Web 2.0 comprises the idea of more widespread application of interconnectivity and interactivity of web-delivered content. Building applications and services around the unique features of the Internet are considered Web 2.0 main characteristics.

By O’Reilly four levels in the hierarchy of Web 2.0 sites could be distinguished:

• Level-3 applications, exist only on the Internet. Examples are eBay, Craigslist, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Skype, dodgeball, AdSense.
• Level-2 applications can operate offline but gain advantages from going online. For example, Flickr benefits from its shared photo-database and from its tag database.
• Level-1 applications operate offline but gain features online (Google Docs & Spreadsheets, iTunes).
• Level-0 applications work as well offline as online. Examples are MapQuest, Yahoo! Local, Google Maps, Gmail.

Basic Characteristics

Web 2.0 websites enable users to build on the interactive facilities of “Web 1.0”. It allows users to run software applications fully through a browser. Users can own the data on a Web 2.0 site and control those data. These sites may have a so-called “Architecture of participation” that stimulates users to add value to the application as they use it. It is in contrast to traditional websites, which only limited visitors may view and whose content only the site’s owner could modify. Web 2.0 sites often feature a rich, user-friendly interface based on AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and xml) and similar client-side interactivity frameworks, or full client-server application frameworks.

According to Best, the characteristics of Web 2.0 are: rich user experience, user participation, dynamic content, metadata, web standards and scalability. Further essential attributes of Web 2.0 include openness, freedom and collective intelligence in the sense of user participation.

Technology overview

“Web 2.0″ applications are loosely associated with technologies such as wikis, blogs, social-networking, open-source, open-content, file-sharing, peer-production, etc.

Web 2.0 websites usually involve some of the following techniques (sometimes the acronym SLATES is used to refer to them):

Search

the ease of finding information through keyword search which makes the platform valuable.

Links

guide to important pieces of information. The best pages are the most frequently linked to.

Authoring

the ability to create constantly updating content. In wikis, the content is iterative in the sense that people undo and redo each other’s work. In blogs, content is accumulated in posts and comments of blog visitors.

Tags

classification of content by creating tags that are simple, one-word descriptions to facilitate searching and to avoid rigid, pre-made categories.

Extensions

automation of some of the work and pattern matching.

Signals

the use of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) technology to inform users about any changes of the content by sending e-mails to them.

Criticism

There is an opinion that “Web 2.0″ does not represent a new version of the World Wide Web at all. In fact, the WEB1 technologies and concepts are constantly applied in WEB2, too. For example, AJAX do not substitute protocols like HTTP, but add a further layer of abstraction on top of them. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the WWW, described the term “Web 2.0″ as a “piece of jargon”:

“Nobody really knows what it means…If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.”

Nonetheless, the “WEB 2.0″ service mark was registered at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) on June 27, 2006. The European Union application remains currently^[update] pending after its filing on March 23, 2006.

Reference:

Wikipedia, the free enciclopedia

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