Understanding WEB 2.0

Web 2.0 has been the buzzword everyone is talking about these days. Web 2.0 revolution has been the backbone of many of today's sites like twitter, facebook etc helping them grab a major user base on the World Wide Web. But what actually contributes in the development of Web 2.0? Lets talk about it a bit...

Understanding Web 2.0

Web 2.0, as you have heard, is basically a qualitative approach towards developing a new generation of websites and applications that aims to share, distribute and receive information on various platforms like PC, Laptops, Hand Held Devices etc in which other users can also contribute with their own knowledge and experience. It provides some cool and better ways to help an online user in finding what he/she is looking for. Everything that eases the user's web experience is a part of the big Web 2.0 development. In short, Web 2.0 comprises of new kinds of application or combination of technologies allowing users to share experience, easy distribution of information, making networks, mass publishing etc. Further characteristics, such as openness, freedom and collective intelligence by way of user participation, can also be viewed as essential attributes of Web 2.0

Why Web 2.0!!!

Web 2.0 usage grew as there felt a need to develop applications which can run on the web as easily and efficiently as it would run on your desktop without having a need to install them. Making internet as a platform is one of the leading revolutions related to Web 2.0. Understanding of this idea lead to various companies to jump into the development of various applications which allows users to share and contribute, with their own experiences, by means of different applications such as blogs, forums, pod casts, wikis, photos, comments etc. User collaboration and contribution with the help of these applications was the reason of the increased popularity of these new programming models. It is in this era only that Open Source Platform like PHP, Apache PERL etc also experienced a tremendous growth in their use. And none of the applications were static or the development of them came to halt. The applications were also as dynamic as the growing need of the users using it. Being Open Source (mostly) gave the users the ability to mould them according to thier needs and thats what Web 2.0 is all about - "User decide how they want IT to be".

Characteristics of Web 2.0

Although the definition of Web 2.0 is quite abstract as their are no significant boundaries to aptly describe the real meaning of Web 2.0, there are few characterisitic features to describe the set of principles around what is called the gravitational core of Web 2.0.

Web as Platform

A platform beats an application everytime. The web is now considered to be a platform allowing users to run various software-applications to run entirely through the browser itself. Web 2.0 sites often feature a rich, user-friendly interface based on Ajax and similar client-side interactivity frameworks, or full client-server application frameworks such as OpenLaszlo, Flex, and the ZK framework. The management of websites, allowing user contribution, requires what we call "The Radical Trust".

Collaboration

Harnessing Collective Intelligence was one the key principles involved in the success of many Web 2.0 web sites. Wikipedia is one such example. Through 'The Radical Trust', the community website, based on collaboration of various users adding information to it, is now one of the top 10 websites of the world.

Hyperlinking was one the foundation criterias underlying the success of various Web 2.0 sites. Users added new contents are bound in to the structure of the web by other users discovering the content and linking to it. With associations becoming stronger through repetition or intensity, the web of connections grows organically as an output of the collective activity of all web users.

Yahoo saw its growth through with the aggregation of work by million of users to its enormously growing Directory of links or catalog. Backinking was the foundation of biggest Search Market Leader, Google. Pagerank, the breakthrough in search, rely completely on the structure of links rather than characteristics of document. Various other web sites like Flickr and Del.icio.us mastered in whart is called Folksonomy, the choice of free tagging by the user.

Web 2.0 sites never required any special marketing campaign or like to get known to users around the world but something called Viral Marketing, recomendation of sites from one user to another, did the spread of their popularity.

Data - The Pioneering Key to Success

All the significant websites have something thats backing them up - Database. Wikipedia, Napster, Amazon, Google, etc all have their databases as the core of thier success. The ownership of such databases was what made these websites a Pioneer in their fields. In many cases, where there is significant cost to create the data, there may be an opportunity for an Intel Inside style play, with a single source for the data. In others, the winner will be the company that first reaches critical mass via user aggregation, and turns that aggregated data into a system service. Much as the rise of proprietary software led to the Free Software movement, we expect the rise of proprietary databases to result in a Free Data movement within the next decade. One can see early signs of this countervailing trend in open data projects such as Wikipedia, the Creative Commons, and in software projects like Greasemonkey, which allow users to take control of how data is displayed on their computer.

End to Software Release Cycle Model

Delivering software, not as a product, but as a service is also one of the defining characteristics of the internet era. This lead to fundamental shift in development of softwares as services that required maintenance on daily basis, as compared to old times when there were hardly any updates in long periods. Think in this way, Google must continuously crawl the web and update its indices, continuously filter out link spam and other attempts to influence its results, continuously and dynamically respond to hundreds of millions of asynchronous user queries, simultaneously matching them with context-appropriate advertisements. In these kind of software models, Users are regarded as co-devlopers, meaning that the software is developed in open with various users contributing in what they like, thus helping the Software Owners slipping in updates on Monthly or even daily basis.

No Confinement to a single device

Another characteristics of Web 2.0 sites was that they were not confined to be limited to a single device but to be made avalable on Various platforms like laptop, mobile etc. This lead the user to use the benefits of the same web-application even on the go.

What makes a great Web 2.0 application?!

The answer can be given by anyone who is a World Wide Web user - "What makes it convenient for me to do my tasks!" Anything that enriches and adds flavor to a user's online experience is considered as a Web 2.0 application. It is a shift towards a user-centered approach and applications should be made according to it. Some of the common characteristics of a Web 2.0 application are - rich user experience, user participation, dynamic content, metadata, web standards and scalability. If you incorporate these into your design and codes, you just made a perfect application.

Here's a list of the Top Web 2.0 websites.

Here's a list of the Top Web 2.0 applications grouped by their domain.

Read about Web 3.0