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INTRODUCTION With its allusion to the Version numbers that commonly designate software upgrades, Web 2.0 was a trendy way to indicate an improved form of the World Wide Web, and the term has been in occasional use for several years. It was eventually popularized by O'Reilly Media and MediaLive International for a conference they hosted after Dale Dougherty mentioned it during a brainstorming session. Dougherty suggested that the Web was in a Renaissance , with changing rules and evolving Business Model s. The participants assembled examples — " DoubleClick was Web 1.0; Google AdSense is Web 2.0. Ofoto is Web 1.0; Flickr is Web 2.0" — rather than definitions. Dougherty recruited John Battelle for a business perspective, and it became the first Web 2.0 Conference in October 2004. A second annual conference was held in October 2005. In their first conference opening talk, O'Reilly and Battelle summarized key principles they believe characterize Web 2.0 applications: the Web as platform; data as the driving force; network effects created by an " Architecture Of Participation "; innovation in assembly of systems and sites composed by pulling together features from distributed, independent developers (a kind of "open source" development); lightweight business models enabled by content and service syndication; the end of the software adoption cycle ("the perpetual beta"); software above the level of a single device, leveraging the power of " The Long Tail ". An earlier usage of the phrase ''Web 2.0'' was as a synonym for " Semantic Web ", and indeed, the two concepts complement each other. The combination of Social Network ing systems such as FOAF and XFN with the development of tag-based Folksonomies and delivered through Blog s and Wiki s creates a natural basis for a semantic environment. Although the technologies and services that comprise ''Web 2.0'' are less powerful than an internet in which the machines can understand and extract meaning, as proponents of the Semantic Web envision, ''Web 2.0'' represents a step in its direction. As used by its proponents, the phrase refers to one or more of the following:
Many find it easiest to define Web 2.0 by associating it with companies or products that embody its principles. Some of the more well known Web 2.0 entities are Google Maps , Flickr , Del.icio.us , Digg , Last.fm , and Technorati . Many recently developed concepts and technologies are seen as contributing to Web 2.0, including Weblog s, Linklogs , Wiki s, Podcast s, RSS Feed s and other forms of many to many publishing; Social Software , web API s, Web Standard s, online Web Service s, and others. Proponents of the Web 2.0 concept say that it differs from early web development, retroactively labeled ''Web 1.0'', in that it is a move away from static Website s, the use of Search Engines , and Surfing from one website to the next, to a more dynamic and interactive World Wide Web. Others argue that the original and fundamental concepts of the WWW are not actually being superseded. Skeptics argue that the term is little more than a Buzzword , or that it means whatever its proponents want it to mean in order to convince their customers, investors and the media that they are creating something fundamentally new, rather than continuing to develop and use well-established technologies {Link without Title} . , 2005 .]] 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. The success of the Dot-com era depended on a more dynamic Web (sometimes labeled ''Web 1.5'') where Content Management System s 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. Proponents of the Web 2.0 approach believe that Web usage is increasingly oriented toward interaction and rudimentary Social Network s, which can serve content that exploits Network Effect s with or without creating a visual, interactive web page. In one view, Web 2.0 sites act more as Points Of Presence , or User -dependent Web Portal s, than as traditional Website s. They have become so advanced new internet users cannot create these websites, they are only users of web services, done by specialist professional experts. Access to consumer generated content facilitated by Web 2.0 brings the web closer to Tim Berners-Lee 's original concept of the web as a democratic, personal, and DIY medium of communication. MARKET DRIVERS OF WEB 2.0 While the term might have appeared out of nowhere, the underlying fundamentals of this evolutionary shift stay the same:
NEW WEB-BASED COMMUNITIES Web 2.0 has created new online social networks amongst the general public. Some of the websites run social software where people work together. Other websites reproduce several individuals' RSS feeds on one page. Other ones provide deeplinking between individual websites. The syndication and messaging capabilities of Web 2.0 have created, to a greater or lesser degree, a tightly-woven social fabric among individuals that would have formerly been impossible. Unarguably, the nature of web-based communities has changed in recent months and years. The meaning of these changes, however, has pundits divided. Basically, ideological lines run thusly: Web 2.0 either empowers the individual and provides an outlet for the 'voice of the voiceless'; or it elevates the Amateur to the detriment of professionalism, expertise and clarity. NEW WEB-BASED APPLICATIONS The richer user experience afforded by Ajax has prompted the development of web sites that mimic Personal Computer applications, such as Word Processing , the Spreadsheet , and Slide-show Presentation . Wysiwyg Wiki sites replicate many features of PC authoring applications. Still other sites perform collaboration and Project Management functions. Java enables sites that provide computation-intensive video capability. One of the best known sites of this broad class, Writely , was acquired by Google in early 2006. Critics refer to this trend as '' ASP 1.1 '', and point out that numerous similar web-based application services, or ASP s, appeared during the Dot-com Bubble , and then vanished, having failed to gain a critical mass of customers. The best known of these, Intranets.com was acquired in 2005 by WebEx for slightly more than the total it had raised in Venture Capital , after six years in business. Whether a large market will embrace a model that requires businesses to hand over both software and data to third parties remains a topic of debate. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS While the definiton of a Web 2.0 application is still hotly debated, it is generally accepted that a Web 2.0 website would exibit some basic characteristics. These include:
TECHNOLOGY OVERVIEW 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 a number of the following techniques:
Rich Internet Applications See Also: Rich Internet Application Recently, . Server-side software The functionality of Web 2.0 Rich Internet Applications builds on the existing Web Server architecture, but puts much greater emphasis on back-end software. Syndication differs only nominally from dynamic content management publishing methods, but web services typically require much more robust Database and Workflow support, and become very similar to the traditional intranet functionality of an Application Server . Vendor approaches to date fall under either a Universal Server approach, which bundles most of the necessary functionality in a single server platform, or a web server Plugin approach, which uses standard publishing tools enhanced with API interfaces and other tools. Regardless of the approach chosen, the evolutionary path toward Web 2.0 is not expected to be significantly altered by these choices. Client-side software The extra functionality provided by Web 2.0 depends on users having more than passive access to the data on the Server s. This can be through forms in an HTML page, a scripting language such as Javascript , or through Java . These methods all make use of the Client computer to take varying degrees of work off the server. RSS See Also: RSS (file format) The first and most important evolution towards Web 2.0 involves the syndication of website content, using standardized protocols which permit end-users to make use of a site's data in another context, ranging from another website, to a browser plugin, or a separate desktop application. Protocols which permit syndication include RSS , RDF (as in RSS 1.1), and Atom , all of which are flavors of XML . Specialized protocols such as FOAF and XFN (both for Social Network ing) extend functionality of sites or permit end-users to interact without centralized websites. See microformats for more specialized data formats. Due to the recent development of these trends, many of these protocols remain De Facto rather than formal standards. Web protocols Web communication protocols are a key element of the Web 2.0 infrastructure. Two major ones are REST and SOAP . More recently, SOAP has dropped the acronym and is now only known as SOAP.
In both cases, access to the service is defined by an API . Often this API is specific to the server, but standard web service APIs (for example, for posting to a Blog ) are also widely used. Most, but not all, communications with web services involve some form of XML (Extensible Markup Language). See also WSDL (Web Services Description Language), which is the standard way of publishing a SOAP API, and the List Of Web Service Specifications for links to many other web service standards, including those many whose names begin 'WS-'. CRITICISM As there are no set standards for 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 , and other semantically useless tags, are thrown 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 been trying to move away from. Many of the ideas of Web 2.0 have been employed on websites that were around well before the term was developed; ', 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. It could also be argued that "Web 2.0" does not represent a new version of World Wide Web at all, and is in fact comprised entirely of "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. SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS References on APIs Web Development Framework for Web 2.0
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