A brief introduction to Web 2.0
Web 2.0 is a useful paradigm for us to understand this particular moment in the evolution of the World Wide Web. In the space of just two or three years we have seen a tidal wave of innovation leading to an explosion of new web 2.0 sites and services.
It is possible to identify a cluster of key features of new Web 2.0 sites, businesses and services:
Web 2.0 companies invite and encourage participation and collaboration. They harness collective user-intelligence, opinion and expertise, and tend to trust users as co-contributors and co-developers. Web 2.0 is a two-way medium in which users are seen as readers and writers. Web 1.0 was largely information that was given to users, Web 2.0 is populated with content that is generated by the users. A large amount of the information available on Web 2.0 was created and posted by the public in the form of blogs, wikis, podcasts, ratings, forums, recommendations, reviews, votes etc. In the new language of web 2.0, it is better to be a ‘seeder’ than a ‘leech’.
A Web 1.0 address book might store contact information such as email, personal addresses, telephone numbers etc. A Web 2.0 address book remembers every message sent and received and all replies and forwards. It logs connections and builds patterns and is smart enough to query the wider system and search alternative routes if no answer is available locally. In doing so it builds a log of usage patterns so that social networks can be built. RSS feeds notify subscribers of updates to sites and services in real time to seduce them into further involvement. Collective activity leads to more and more connections, like improving connections in the synapses of the brain. Only recently the ‘Artic Monkeys’ were propelled to fame and notoriety on a wave of ‘viral marketing’ based on votes, downloads, word of mouth and the power of the click.
A key feature of web 2.0 is that services get better the more people that use them.
P2P file sharing sites including ‘Napster’ and ‘Bittorrent’ are decentralised and every client becomes a server. Users bring their own resources to the party and smart P2P software’s can break off or resume downloads and intuitively find alternative pathways to users who offer identical downloads, thus providing extra bandwidth and data. The more popular the file, the faster it can be served.
By encouraging co-operation and collaboration Web 2.0 businesses and services extend themselves to the very edges of the web, to individuals, homes, schools, Internet café’s and small businesses etc. They also try and integrate mobile and portable devices, hand-helds, and PDA’s and assimilate all of this new information. ‘iTunes’ is an application that seamlessly connects the user to large servers.
Web 2.0 businesses and services are continually building new layers of information into their databases and adding new fields including information provided by users, which in turn adds value and leads to improvements to the service. A good example of this is ‘Amazon’ who invite annotations to supplement their data via reviews, recommendations and star ratings. They place a great emphasis on user engagement. Amazon’s ‘most popular’ tags are based on a mix of direct purchases and also the flow of activity around their products, ‘people who bought this also bought’….. They continually collect and enhance data with cover photos, TOC’s, user reviews and samples etc which add extra layers of value.
There is also a greater level of syndication and co-operation between Web 2.0 companies for mutual benefit. In parallel to the escalation of Open Source software’s and applications, standards are open and encourage developers to ‘mashup’, hack and break down software and repackage them in new ways. ‘Housingmaps.com’ is ‘Google maps’ combined with ‘Craiglist’ apartment rental data. Users have become testers of the perpetual beta, Flickr for instance, upload new page builds every half hour. This flurry of activity means that software’s continually improve and depth is added to services. Businesses use 3600 feedback to evaluate what works and is attractive to users, and quickly ditch what doesn’t work.
‘AJAX’ is a term for several technologies coming together in their own right and in new and powerful ways which deliver applets and dynamic content such as live news and other active content in different areas of the web page. This might be ‘Google maps’, ‘Gmail’, ‘Skype’ etc.
|
Web 1.0 (Provided)
|
|
Web 2.0 (User generated)
|
|
Ofoto
|
>>>>
|
Flickr
|
|
Akamai
|
>>>>
|
BitTorrent
|
|
Mp3.com
|
>>>>
|
Napster
|
|
Britannica Online
|
>>>>
|
Wikipedia
|
|
Personal websites
|
>>>>
|
Blogs
|
|
Content management systems
|
>>>>
|
Wikis
|
|
Directories (taxonomy)
|
>>>>
|
Tag clouds ("folksonomy")
|
Some examples of Web 1.0 and 2.0
Google uses ‘pagerank’ which counts and tracks the new links in the structure of the web and shuffles sites up and down the league table according to usage. ‘Ebay’ provides a context for buying and selling activities and trust relationships are built between customers. ‘You tube’, ‘My Space’ and ‘Facebook’ connect people via personalised web space. On ‘Wikipedia’, entries can be made and edited by any web user, again making good use of this culture of trust. ‘Del.icio.us’ and ‘Flickr’, use ‘folksonomy’ (a collective categorisation of sites based on keywords and tags), so a photo of a kitten might be tagged ‘kitten’ or ‘cute’ etc. ‘Flickr’ and ‘Slideshare’ use ‘watchlists’ to rank photos and shows in terms of popularity.
‘Cloudmark’ incorporates spam filtering which takes into account the number of users who refer to an email as spam. A ‘blogosphere’ of blogs based on chronological organisation and RSS means subscribers can be updated with new content on an array of portable devices and make reciprocal links using ‘backtracks’ or by posting comments. ‘Writely’ and ‘Google docs’ are Web 2.0 Word Processors that allow multiple real-time Wiki style editing. ‘Digg’ and ‘Del.icio.us. are content aggregation services. They provide a mechanism for many users to "digg" a piece of content, and aggregate them like votes to bubble up the most popular content to its widely-viewed pages. In this way Digg culls the actions of its users to provide value.
Conclusion
This has been a necessarily brief tour and summarisation of some of the general underlying principles of web 2.0. Some of the examples given demonstrate what might be seen as ‘core competencies’ of web 2.0, but obviously miss vital others. Some web 2.0 sites make use of all of these principles whilst others might excel in only one or two of them. Some opinion suggests that web 2.0 is merely the same web that we had before, but in the latest phase of its development, and the label web 2.0 is arbitrary and unnecessary. As the introduction suggests, it is probably simply a paradigm which can help us to understand some of these latest amazing moments in the evolution of the World Wide Web.
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.