One definition of Web 2.0 is that it refers to advanced Internet technology and the development of the web and its design that aims to facilitate communication, secure information sharing and collaboration on the World Wide Web – essentially the Web as a platform.
This has lead to the expansion and growth of web based communities, hosted services and applications that include social networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis and blogs and folksonomy (also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging).
Originally, data was uploaded on to websites and users just viewed or downloaded the site’s content. With Web 2.0, users now have more input into the features and extent of web content.
Web 2.0 websites typically include some of the following features/techniques:
Searching - finding information through keyword search which makes the internet as a platform valuable
Links that guide users to information
Authoring – the ability to create constantly updated content. Examples of this are wikis and blogs. Blogs are online diaries or journals that are stored on the Internet. Blogs generally consist of text and images appearing in chronological order with the most recent entry shown at the top of the page. Wikis are online encyclopaedia maintained by users. They allow users to contribute to and add definitions or topics.
Tags – labelling of content by creating tags that are simple, one-word descriptions to make searching easy
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) technology that allows someone to link not just to a webpage, but to subscribe to it, with notification via emails, every time a page changes
Podcasting – an audio file or series of audio files that can be shared with others. You can subscribe to a podcast.
Ajax and other new technologies - Ajax has also encouraged the development of websites that imitate desktop applications such as word processing, spreadsheets and slide show presentations. iGoogle is a good example of this. Essentially, the World Wide Web is being used as a platform. It allows users to use applications through a browser. Lots of Web 2.0 applications couldn’t exist without the use of the internet, eg. Skype, Wikipedia or eBay
Ease of data creation, revision or deletion by individual users. The users own the data and are able to control the data. Users are responsible for the growing hype of Web 2.0
Read/Write Web – no longer a one way medium, social networking aspects become a main ingredient. Allows collaboration and communication between more than two people, eg. Social bookmarking – some examples of social networking sites are YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and Flickr
Mashups – a web application that combines data from one or more sources into a single integrated tool
Dynamic as opposed to static website content. User friendly, rich and interactive interfaces – by use of CSS and AJAX, to create dynamic pages that makes it easy to see even more information
Interactive encyclopaedias and dictionaries
Advanced gaming
Websites seem to be so interactive these days and web design is constantly evolving platform.
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