What Is Web 2.0

The Web 2.0, phase was first coined by O’Reilly Media, while brainstorming idea’s on next generation web-based technologies in 2003, and was popularised by the first web 2.0 conferences which took place in Amsterdam in October 2004. The concept of Web 2.0 refers to technologies that allow data to become independent of the person who produced it or the site it originated on. It deals with how information can be broken up into units that flow freely from one site to another, often in ways the producer did not foresee or intend.

Since the launch of web 2.0 it has clearly taken hold, with more than 9.5 million citations in Google. But there's still a huge amount of disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means, with some people decrying it as a meaningless marketing buzzword, and others accepting it as the new conventional wisdom.

So what really is web 2.0?

(Tim O'Reilly) the man who coined the phrase Web 2.0 have given his own defamation of web 2.0 architecture on “O’Reilly Radar website on October 2005”, he stated the web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an "architecture of participation," and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.

Web 1.0 VS Web 2.0

Web 1.0Web 2.0
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Mp3 .comNapster
Britannica Wikipedia

In Web 1.0 applications, a Web page is the basic unit of the application. Every event that happens in the application is represented by a page. For example, we might need one page to log in to an application, a separate page to view the latest news summary and yet another to view the details of a single news item.

Each time the user carries out an action and requests a new page, the Web server responds by returning another Web page or by refreshing the current page. For every user interaction, the entire browser window is refreshed, including any fixed interface elements that don’t change from page to page, such as global navigation. This approach takes the server longer to refresh and extract data in to the webpage.

Web 2.0 is built on technologies like Ajax, a web development approach based on JavaScript and the XML programming language. This mix of technologies allows pages to function more like desktop-based applications rather than as old-fashioned static content pages as we have been used to find on the Web.
The Web 2.0 paradigm allows net users to pull information from a variety of sites simultaneously and deliver it on their own site to achieve new purposes, application such as RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 are classical example of web 2.0.

Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn't have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core. You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core.
As software developer, the evidence of web 2.0 is already here, with RSS aggregators, search engines, portals, APIs (application programming interfaces, which provide hooks to data) and Web services (where data can be accessed via XML-RPC, SOAP and other technologies).

Google the internet giant is absolutely at the heart of web 2.0 and the ability to bring many of these services together to create vast interlinked content offerings will certainly appeal. For the enterprise and end-user Google already offers a number of Office-style applications as a hosted offering. The company is also readying the finished version of its hosted email Exchange-offering. Interfaces like these are changing the way we store, access, and share information. It matters very little what domain content comes from.

Source:
Dnzone.com
O’Reilly Radar
silicon.com