What is Web 2.0

These days we hear a lot about web 2.0 and I recieve many queries about it. Here, I present some basic information about web 2.0, from Wikipedia.

Early web development (in this context, labeled Web 1.0) often comprised static HTML pages that were updated rarely, if at all. The success of the dot-com era depended on a more dynamic Web (sometimes labeled Web 1.5) where content management systems served dynamic HTML web pages created on the fly from a content database that could more easily be changed. In both senses, so-called eyeballing was considered intrinsic to the Web experience, thus making page hits and visual aesthetics important factors.

Web 2.0 is "a social phenomenon referring to an approach to creating and distributing Web content itself, characterised by open communication, decentralization of authority, freedom to share and re-use, and "the market as a conversation"

Proponents of the Web 2.0 approach believe that Web usage is increasingly oriented toward interaction and rudimentary social networks, which can serve content that exploits network effects with or without creating a visual, interactive web page.

Many recently developed concepts and technologies are seen as contributing to Web 2.0, including weblogs, wikis, podcasts, rss feeds and other forms of many to many publishing; social software, web APIs, web standards, online web services, AJAX, and others.


Technology

The technology infrastructure of Web 2.0 is complex and evolving. A website could be said to be built using Web 2.0 technologies if it featured a number of the following techniques:

• CSS, semantically valid XHTML markup, and Microformats
• Unobtrusive Rich Application techniques (such as Ajax)
• Java Web Start
• Flex/Laszlo/Flash
• XUL
• Syndication of data in RSS/Atom
• Aggregation of RSS/Atom data
• Clean and meaningful URLs
• Support posting to a weblog
• REST or XML Webservice APIs
• Some social networking aspects

Comparison to web 1.0

According to Tim O'Reilly Web 2.0 can be compared to Web 1.0 in this way: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

Web 1.0	Web 2.0
DoubleClick	Google AdSense
Ofoto	Flickr
Akamai	BitTorrent
MP3.com	Napster
Britannica Online	Wikipedia
personal websites	blogging
Evite	upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation	search engine optimization
page views	cost per click
screen scraping	web services
publishing	participation
content management systems	wikis
directories (taxonomy)	tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness	syndication