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We have been receiving a lot of questions from clients recently about what Web 2.0 is all about. There seems to be a great confusion as to what the term Web 2.0 really means. Is it a new visual design concept, a buzzword, new technologies? Or is it an attempt to brand services and techniques that have been around for years?
Unfortunately there is no simple answer to any of these questions. Web 2.0 seems to be defined differently in every article we read and opinion we here. No wonder people are getting frustrated.
Visually speaking, if you see a website with drop shadows or the logo has a slick reflection (which is referred to as the wet floor effect) and the text is represented with super large font sizes and bright colors does that make the website Web 2.0?
What if you click on one of several tabs in a web page and the content refreshes right before your eyes instantly to reveal new relevant content without refreshing the whole page through AJAX, does that mean the site is Web 2.0?
I think not. Although I am sure proponents of the Web 2.0 term would argue with me on that point. A lot of companies, businesses and blog’s with a smattering of some or all of these features are all bestowing the Web 2.0 title upon themselves and it’s just not accurate in my mind, but we will get to all that.
Before we attempt to dissect what exactly Web 2.0 is if it is indeed anything but buzzword and vague tech innuendo, let’s talk about the other so called phases of the internet first to better understand where exactly the term Web 2.0 originated from and what preceded it so we can better understand where it is going and whether or not to believe in it.
What Was Considered Web 1.0
If you are one of the proponents that believes the web evolved in stages Web 1.0 could be defined as the birth of static HTML pages. In the mid-1990s, Web 1.0 began as a repository of information and static content. What is now termed “Web 1.0″ often consisted of static HTML pages that were updated rarely, if at all. They depended solely on HTML, which a new Internet user could learn fairly easily to cobble together some type of web presence.
In Web 1.0 genre, a small number of developers created Web pages for a large number of readers. As a result, people could get information by going directly to the source: Adobe.com for graphic design issues, Microsoft.com for Windows issues, and CNN.com for news just to name a few.
Over time, as the web grew, more and more people started writing content in addition to reading it. This had a major impact on the web as we knew it — all of a sudden there was too much information to keep up with!
No one had enough time for everyone who wanted our attention and visiting all sites with relevant content simply wasn’t possible.
Main Web Technologies Used:
- HTML
- JavaScript
- Simple Forms with little or no user interaction
Site Examples:
- drudgereport.com – Founded by Matt Drudge, 1994. What began as a gossipy email newsletter has, since its first post in 1994, developed into one of the most powerful media outlets in American politics.
- amazon.com – Founded by Jeff Bezos, 1994. Amazon.com quickly became the headline act of the dotcom boom and Bezos was Time magazine’s man of the year in 1999.
- yahoo.com – Founded by David Filo and Jerry Yang, 1994. Yahoo.com is an internet portal and media corporation that is now the single most visited website on the internet.
With the desire for businesses and individuals to keep their users interests a new system was needed. This new system evolved the web into its next pseudo phase Web 1.5.
What Was Considered Web 1.5
Web 1.5 could be described as the dynamic web with the advent or creation of Content Management Systems or CMS for short and the addition of new and exciting interactive content to websites that users could control and manage. The tail end of this era saw the creation and arrival of “Blogging” which was a huge step forward toward the original purpose of the web which placed the power of content and its creation in the hands of the everyday people.
These dynamic and interactive content styles revolutionized the web and changed the face of many websites as well as the backend systems that supported or powered them. These websites powered by new CMS systems enabled website owners or publishers to not only update and add fresh content more frequently but easily without hassle or fuss. This reduced the need for a team of developers to be on hand to code the latest updates or additions. These CMS systems although a little intimidating at first for some were generally as easy to use as a rich text editor and had powerful management features that gave the user the ability to upload images, text and even multimedia content such as video and audio files with the a few simple clicks.
The quickly rising amount of audio and video files being utilized online to inform, sell or tantalize swiftly revolutionized the way we interacted with information, entertainment and the mainstream of media as a whole. These types of content gave websites a certain amount of intrigue or “stickiness” as the term is used in the web development community, but this was only the tip of the ice berg.
Blog’s or Blogging, which stemmed from this time frame and is still currently all the rage is in all reality a CMS with an simplified front end design with a straightforward yet very powerful ability to allow users to interact with the website, comments.
A simple form at the bottom of the page (generally after the article or post) allowed the user to add his or her comments which would appear after the article for others to read.
This was true user interaction and it was embraced very quickly by the online community from personal publishers to large corporations as a way to interact with their users, fans and customers.
So what powered all of these interactive and powerful online applications? Most of the before mentioned advancements were programmed by powerful server side programming languages and a smattering of client side programming languages.
Main Web Technologies Used:
A few of the more widely used languages and technologies used to develop truly interactive website experiences and Content Management Systems are:
- PHP
- ColdFusion
- ASP
- Perl
- Flash’s ActionScript
- XML
- SQL
- MySQL
- Oracle
- DHTML
- JavaScript
- Java
The before mentioned list is by NO means all of the programming languages or technologies used in this era or for the creation of dynamic and interactive websites, merely an example of the most commonly used, some of the best websites and some of the worst utilized several or more of these languages to leverage the power of each and to attempt to provide their visitors and users with the features and information they desire.
Site Examples:
amazon.com – Yes, Amazon.com. I know what you’re thinking, didn’t they just mention them in Web 1.0 and yes we did. Amazon has always been forward thinking and far seeing with both their users and their site development. With their powerful CMS and customer reviews on every product, sample chapters and multimedia products not to mention the powerful and tightly integrated programming languages makes Amazon.com a leader in this era of the web.
Ebay.com – Ebay.com although started in 1995, really matured in this era and is completely user and user sales driven, complete with reviews, ratings and a vast individual store template and customization scheme made Ebay.com a force of nature to compete against and to keep users away from.
CNN.com – CNN.com has always been at the forefront of news and its presentation with sticky features on their website. Their website never fails to attract visitors and keep them there with its rich dynamically driven content and multimedia news blurbs that are constantly updated 24 hours a day seven days a week. Complete with user polls and questionnaires, users feel as if their involved with the news not just reading it.
What is Web 2.0?
So now that we have seen the basics of what led up to the so called Web 2.0 it’s time now to attempt to figure out exactly what that term means. As I mentioned earlier this is no mean chore since it seems to mean something different to everyone. The term seems to be used loosely and perhaps this is a good thing since a term or technology can only encompass so much.
According to Wikipedia “O´Reilly Media coined the phrase Web 2.0 in 2004 to refer to a supposed second-generation of Internet-based services that let people collaborate and share information online in perceived new ways — such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies. O´Reilly Media, in collaboration with MediaLive International, used the phrase as a title for a series of conferences and since then it has become a popular, if ill-defined and often criticized, buzzword amongst the technical and marketing communities”.
Phew…so what does that mean? If a website shares information and collaborates with users its does that mean it is web 2.0? Wait a minute; didn’t Ebay.com, Yahoo.com, Amazon.com and a whole slew of others already do that previously in the so called Web 1.5 era?
Maybe we should look at another definition to help clarify things.
Answers.com has Web 2.0 defined as “An umbrella term for the second wave of the World Wide Web. Web 2.0 implies information and computing platform as well as a content storehouse. Sometimes called the “New Internet,” Web 2.0 promotes thin client computing, where everything is stored on servers (on the Web), and a user has access from any laptop or desktop computer via a Web browser”. The Answer.com definition is slightly more robust than the previous one but let’s see if we can mash the two together and add some more specifics to create a list we can really sink our teeth into.
Web 2.0 seems comprised of the following characteristics:
- It needs to let people collaborate and share information online
- It makes a great title for a conference
- Promotes “Thin Client Computing” (Where a user’s computer that performs all the application processing, but stores nothing locally and everything is stored on the web and everything is handled through the browser).
- The site should not act as a “walled garden” – it should be easy to get data in and out of the system.
- Users usually own their data on the site and can modify at their convenience.
- Mainly web-based – most successful Web 2.0 applications can be used almost entirely through a web browser: this is commonly referred to by the phrase “network as platform”.
- Data returns should be dynamic, not static, changing depending on variables associated with the user’s query (e.g. keywords, location).
- An “architecture of participation” that allows users to add value to the application as they use it.
- Some social networking aspects.
Now that’s a little easier to grasp, but keep in mind that NONE of these aspects or technologies are a new concept to the web, they are just being leveraged in some cases in a different manner. Does that mean it’s a new era of the web? Or is it perhaps just a new spin on the old. You will have to make that determination yourself. With that being said lets talk a little bit about the technology used.
Main Web Technologies Used:
The technology infrastructure of Web 2.0 is complex and evolving; it includes server software, content syndication, messaging protocols, standards-based browsers with plugins and extensions, and various client applications. These differing but complementary approaches provide Web 2.0 with information storage, creation, and dissemination capabilities that go beyond what was formerly expected of websites.
A Web 2.0 website typically features:
- Unobtrusive Rich Internet Application techniques (such as Ajax)
- CSS
- Semantically valid XHTML markup and/or the use of Microformats
- Syndication and aggregation of data in RSS/Atom
- Clean and meaningful URLs
- Weblog publishing
- Mashups
- REST or XML Webservice APIs
- RSS Syndication
- XHTML
- JavaScript
- XML
- Large Font Sizes
- Colorful Headings and Text
- Glossy Icons
- A lot of Drop Shadow Effects
Site Examples:
Wikipedia.com – Wikipedia (a combination of the word wiki and encyclopedia) is an on-line “copyleft” encyclopedia that is constantly evolving and can be edited by anyone. Hosted and supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, this open source resource is collaboratively created and maintained by thousands of users worldwide. Any article contributed to Wikipedia becomes free content that may be used, edited, copied and redistributed by users. All materials contributed to Wikipedia must be verifiable by other users.
Flickr.com – Flickr.com allows photo submitters to categorize their images by use of keyword “tags” (a form of metadata), which allow searchers to easily find images concerning a certain topic such as place name or subject matter. Flickr provides rapid access to images tagged with the most popular keywords. Because of its support for user-generated tags, Flickr repeatedly has been cited as a prime example of effective use of folksonomy. Also, Flickr was one of the first websites to implement tag clouds.
Digg.com – A website with an emphasis on technology and science news. It combines social book marking, blogging, and syndication with a form of non-hierarchical, democratic editorial control. News stories and websites are submitted by users, and then promoted to the front page through a user-based ranking system.
del.icio.us – The website del.icio.us (pronounced as “delicious”) is a social book marking, social software web service for storing and sharing web bookmarks. A non-hierarchical keyword categorization system is used on del.icio.us where users can tag each of their bookmarks with a number of freely chosen keywords (cf. folksonomy). A combined view of everyone’s bookmarks with a given tag is available; for instance, the URL “http://del.icio.us/tag/wiki” displays all of the most recent links tagged “wiki”. Its collective nature also makes it possible to view bookmarks added by similar-minded users.
Web 2.0 – New Technology or Just a New Selling Point?
Given the lack of set standards as to what “Web 2.0″ actually means, implies, or requires, the term can mean radically different things to different people. For instance, many people pushing Web 2.0 talk about well-formed, validated HTML; however, not many production sites actually adhere to this standard. Many people will also talk about web sites “degrading gracefully” (designing a website so that its fundamental features remain usable by people who access it with software that does not support every technology employed by the site); however, the addition of Ajax scripting to websites can render the website completely unusable to anyone browsing with JavaScript turned off, or using a slightly older browser.
Many have complained that the proliferation of Ajax scripts, in combination with unknowledgeable webmasters, has increased the instances of “tag soup”: websites where coders have apparently thrown <script> tags and other semantically useless tags about the HTML file with little organization in mind, in a way that was more commonly done during the dot-com boom, and is something many standards-proponents have tried to eschew. Some critics also object to cluttered, arcane navigation structures in Web 2.0 websites.
Many of the ideas of Web 2.0 featured on networked systems well before the term “Web 2.0″ emerged; Amazon.com, for instance, has allowed users to write reviews and consumer guides since its inception, in a form of self-publishing; and opened up its API to outside developers in 2002.
Conversely, when a website proclaims itself “Web 2.0″ for the use of some trivial feature such as blogs or gradient boxes, observers may generally consider it more an attempt at self-promotion than an actual endorsement of the ideas behind Web 2.0. It has sometimes been reduced to simply a marketing buzzword, like ’synergy’, that can mean whatever a salesperson wants it to do, with little connection to most of the good, but unrelated ideas that it is based on. The argument also exists that “Web 2.0″ does not represent a new version of World Wide Web at all, but merely continues to use “Web 1.0″ technologies and concepts.
Other criticism has included the term “a second bubble” stating that there are too many Web 2.0 companies attempting to create the same product with a lack of business models.
Some venture capitalists have noted that there are too few users of the second generation of web applications to make them an economically-viable target for consumer applications.
Online Resources
Web 2.0
- Web 2.0 by Wikipedia
- Web 2.0 by Answers.com
- Web 2.0 for Designers
- What is Web 2.0 by O´Reilly
- Web 2.0 Websites & Services
