Wikipedia

Web 2.0

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The term "Web 2.0" refers to what some people see as a second phase of development of the World Wide Web, including its architecture and its applications. As used by its proponents, the phrase allegedly refers to one or more of the following:

  • a transition of websites from isolated information silos to sources of content and functionality, thus becoming a computing platform serving web applications to end users
  • 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"
  • a more organized and categorized content, with a far more developed deeplinking web architecture.
  • a shift in economic value of the web, up past a trillion dollars surpassing that of the dot com boom of the late 1990s.

However, a consensus upon its exact meaning has not yet been reached.

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

Web 2.0 allegedly differs from early web development (retroactively labeled Web 1.0) as it is a move away from static websites, email, using search engines and surfing from one website to the next. Others are more skeptical that such basic concepts can be superseded in any real way by those listed above.

Overview

File:Web20 en.png
On September 30, 2005, Tim O'Reilly wrote a seminal piece, neatly summarizing the subject. The mindmap above sums up the memes of web2.0 with example sites and services attached. It was created by Markus Angermeier on November 11 2005.

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.

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. In one view, Web 2.0 sites act more as points of presence, or user-dependent web portals, than as traditional websites.

It is interesting in this context to note the public_html folder that has been a feature in most Linux user's home directory for a decade and the Sites directory in Mac OS X users' home directories since its inception. The standard implementation of the Apache web server has always been able to present any site built, by the user, in this folder onto the World Wide Web as http://hostname/~username. Perhaps Web 2.0 will be less under the control of specialised, so-called web designers and closer to Tim Berners-Lee's original DIY and personal concept.

Origin of the term

It started with a popular article in Business week entitled 'Its a whole new web'. The actual term was coined by Dale Dougherty of O'Reilly Media during a brainstorming session with MediaLive International to develop ideas for a conference that they could jointly host. Dougherty suggested that the Web was in a renaissance, with changing rules and evolving business models. 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 O'Reilly Media, Battelle, and MediaLive launched the first Web 2.0 Conference in October 2004. The 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 "Intel Inside"; network effects driven by an "architecture of participation"; innovation in assembly of systems and sites composed by pulling together features from distributed, independent developers; 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."

Comparison with Semantic Web

An earlier usage of the phrase Web 2.0 was a synonym for Semantic Web. The two concepts are similar and complementary. The combination of social networking systems such as FOAF and XFN with the development of tag-based folksonomies and delivered through blogs and wikis creates a natural basis for a semantic environment.

Technology

The technology infrastructure of Web 2.0 is complex and evolving, but includes server software, content syndication, messaging protocols, standards-based browsers, and various client applications. (Non-standard browser plugins and enhancements are generally eschewed.) 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 website could be said to be built using Web 2.0 technologies if it featured a number of the following techniques:

Technical:

General:

  • The site should not act as a "walled garden" - it should be easy to get data in and out of the system.
  • Users should own their own data on the site
  • Purely Web based - most successful Web 2.0 sites can be used almost entirely through the browser
  • Applicable to an emerging generation of game development, proposed as Thin games

Content syndication

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 networking) 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 are de facto rather than formal standards.

Web services

Two-way messaging protocols are one of the key elements of the Web 2.0 infrastructure. The two major types are the RESTful and SOAP methods. REST (Representational State Transfer) indicates a type of web service invocation where the client transfers the state of all transactions. SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and similar lightweight methods depend on the server to retain state information. In both cases, the service is invoked through an API. Often this API is customized to the website's specific needs, but standard web services APIs (for example, posting to a blog) are also widely used. Generally the common language of web services is XML (Extensible Markup Language), but this is not guaranteed, and proprietary variations abound.

A major example of the new messaging protocols is the Object Properties Broadcasting Protocol. Developed by Chris Dockree, this protocol allows virtual objects "things", that exist on the web, to know what they are and what they can do. As a result, these "things" can communicate with other "things" as they need.

Recently, a hybrid form known as Ajax has evolved to improve the user experience in browser-based web applications. This may be used in proprietary forms (as in Google Maps) or in open form utilizing a web services API, a syndication feed, or even screen scraping.

Broadly speaking, syndication is a type of web service, but this usage is becoming less common. See also WSDL (Web Services Description Language) and list of Web service specifications (aka WS-*).

Server software

Web 2.0 functionality 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.

There are also efforts to put web 2.0 server software on mobile devices such as laptops, wi-fi handhelds, and flash drives. Examples include airWRX, Project BlackDog, and the Intel Research Personal Server. The Web 2.5 blog covers this space.

Social impact

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.

Nicholas Carr is the former editor of the Harvard Business Review and a proponent of the latter view. He urges his readers to regard the internet instrumentally, as a tool we use to procure and to share information. The Web in any version, he says, is in the service of an already established canon of knowledge which the internet might help to disseminate. Thus we are apt to compare traditional means of encryption (primitive, mono-directional file-sharing) with the functions described by Web 2.0. And he does, pitting together the Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia, and deciding in favour of the former. Wikipedia, he writes, is a novel participatory internet phenomenon but not necessarily a good one since

"at a factual level it's unreliable, and the writing is often appalling. I wouldn't depend on it [Wikipedia] as a source, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it to a student writing a research paper."[1]

Carr extends these criticisms to the blogosphere which he says upholds the following values: "superficiality,...opinion over reporting,...echolalia,...ideological extremism and segregation." The irony escapes no one that Carr is himself blogging these recriminations and being held to task here in wiki-format. But despite our clear if unstated partisanship, we do not mean to undermine Carr's well-reasoned opinion. That just because wikis and blogs exist, they are not necessarily any better than traditional forms of communication in the mass media. We need the mainstream media, he says, to uphold opposing values like research, objectivity, precision and authority. There is no reason to think, however, that these values may not be incorporated in a different medium, that is, online.

But Carr's arguments are important if only as an introduction to the rhetoric used to define, praise or condemn Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is after all not a product or object, not something we climb into or touch, but a concept, nebulous at that, that describes certain aspirations or internet tendencies. And he wants to undermine the ideology that places the idea of Web 2.0 in the humanist narrative of emancipation.

Business impact

The potential for exponential business growth as a result of the effects of Web 2.0 comes down to the difference between human-instigated value consumption and computer-instigated value consumption.

It is entirely possible for identification and consumption of value to occur without human intervention as a result of Web 2.0. Organizations will increasingly syndicate their value propositions using syndication formats such as RSS/Atom/RDF. In addition to value syndication, Web Service endpoint publishing will simplify the process of consuming the syndicated values.

API references

Example sites

General coverage and commentary

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