2) Web 2.0
Web 2.0 is not a version upgrade of the internet but is a concept that first came about in 2004 between O’Reilly and MediaLive International (Weckerle & Casarez, 2007). Web 2.0 refers to a
“conglomeration of technologies, ideas and approaches that represent a new way of interacting online” (Liesegang, 2007, p. 1801).
The phrase Web 2.0 has now been attached to many new ideas and internet businesses are using the phrase to impress their customers (Keen, A., & Laskoff, M. 2007). The hype generated by the media interest in the phenomena has left a cloudy view of what Web 2.0 actually means and there is a lot of speculation over when the bubble will burst like the dot com industries in 1997 (Rapoza, 2007).
The hype of Web 2.0 has left people questioning if anything has changed enough to quantify the claims by O’Reilly and MediaLive International in the way we use the internet. However there is a majority consensus that the Internet is being used in a different way incorporating more multimedia content and empowering users to share and network with other users (Keen & Laskoff, 2007).
An aspect of Web 2.0 is the ability to share information across the web and to make it available to anyone. Popular sites such as Wikipedia and Youtube aim to share and manage user’s knowledge and ideas for free, where as popular social networking sites allow anyone to freely create their own web page free of charge (Vernon, 2007). The increase of Server Orientated Architecture in business has also added to Web 2.0 with users experiencing desktop like applications in their web browsers (Open Ajax Alliance [OAA], 2007). It is important to understand that all the technologies now classed as Web 2.0 have been available before the Web 2.0 hype. This also means that the technologies have already undergone critique by accessibility standards published on the internet by W3.
The confusion of what is and isn’t Web 2.0 has been picked up by O’Reilly Media who were involved in first coining the phrase. Tim O’Reilly sums up that there are different levels of Web 2.0:
Level 3 |
The application could ONLY exist on the net, and draws its essential power from the network and the connections it makes possible between people or applications. These are applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. EBay, craigslist, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Skype, (and yes, Dodgeball) meet this test. They are fundamentally driven by shared online activity. The web itself has this character, which Google and other search engines have then leveraged. (You can search on the desktop, but without link activity, many of the techniques that make web search work so well are not available to you.) Web crawling is one of the fundamental Web 2.0 activities, and search applications like Adsense for Content also clearly have Web 2.0 at their heart. I had a conversation with Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, the other day, and he summed up his philosophy and strategy as "Don't fight the internet." In the hierarchy of web 2.0 applications, the highest level is to embrace the network, to understand what creates network effects, and then to harness them in everything you do. |
Level 2 |
The application could exist offline, but it is uniquely advantaged by being online. Flickr is a great example. You can have a local photo management application (like iPhoto) but the application gains remarkable power by leveraging an online community. In fact, the shared photo database, the online community, and the artifacts it creates (like the tag database) is central to what distinguishes Flickr from its offline counterparts. And its fuller embrace of the internet (for example, that the default state of uploaded photos is "public") is what distinguishes it from its online predecessors. |
Level 1 |
The application can and does exist successfully offline, but it gains additional features by being online. Writely is a great example. If you want to do collaborative editing, its online component is terrific, but if you want to write alone, as Fallows did, it gives you little benefit (other than availability from computers other than your own.) |
Level 0 |
The application has primarily taken hold online, but it would work just as well offline if you had all the data in a local cache. MapQuest, Yahoo! Local, and Google Maps are all in this category (but mashups like housingmaps.com are at Level 3.) To the extent that online mapping applications harness user contributions, they jump to Level 2. |
(O'Reilly, 2006, para. 4)
This also means that just because you put AJAX on a website it does not necessarily make it Web 2.0. There is however a consensus that AJAX supports the majority of Web 2.0 applications.