"Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform , and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform." [4]
"an idea in people's heads rather than a reality. It's actually an idea that the reciprocity between the user and the provider is what's emphasized. In other words, genuine interactivity, if you like, simply because people can upload as well as download". [7]
Recently , rich-Internet application techniques such as Ajax , Adobe Flash , Flex , Nexaweb , OpenLaszlo and Silverlight have evolved that have the potential to improve the user-experience in browser-based applications. These technologies allow a web-page to request an update for some part of its content, and to alter that part in the browser, without needing to refresh the whole page at the same time.
Functionally, Web 2.0 applications build on the existing Web server architecture, but rely much more heavily on back-end software. Syndication differs only nominally from the methods of publishing using dynamic content management , 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 either under a universal server approach (which bundles most of the necessary functionality in a single server platform) or under a web-server plugin approach (which uses standard publishing tools enhanced with API interfaces and other tools).
The extra functionality provided by Web 2.0 depends on the ability of users to work with the data stored on servers . This can come about through forms in an HTML page, through a scripting language such as Javascript , or through Flash , Silverlight or Java . These methods all make use of the client computer to reduce server workloads and to increase the responsiveness of the application.
Advocates of "Web 2.0" may regard syndication of site content as a Web 2.0 feature, involving as it does standardized protocols, which permit end-users to make use of a site's data in another context (such as another website, a browser plugin, or a separate desktop application). Protocols which permit syndication include RSS (Really Simple Syndication also known as "web syndication"), RDF (as in RSS 1.1), and Atom , all of them XML -based formats. Observers have started to refer to these technologies as " Web feed " as the usability of Web 2.0 evolves and the more user-friendly Feeds icon supplants the RSS icon.
Specialized protocols such as FOAF and XFN (both for social networking ) extend the functionality of sites or permit end-users to interact without centralized websites.
Machine-based interaction, a common feature of Web 2.0 sites, uses two main approaches to Web APIs, which allow web-based access to data and functions: REST and SOAP .
Often servers use proprietary APIs, but standard APIs (for example, for posting to a blog or notifying a blog update) have also come into wide use. Most communications through APIs involve XML (eXtensible Markup Language) or JSON payloads.
See also Web Services Description Language (WSDL) (the standard way of publishing a SOAP API) and this list of Web Service specifications .
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The analysis of the economic implications of "Web 2.0" applications and loosely-associated technologies such as wikis, blogs, social-networking, open-source, open-content, file-sharing, peer-production, etc. has also gained scientific attention. This area of research investigates the implications Web 2.0 has for an economy and the principles underlying the economy of Web 2.0.
Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams argue in their book Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (2006) that the economy of "the new web" depends on mass collaboration. Tapscott and Williams regard it as important for new media companies to find ways of how to make profit with the help of Web 2.0 The prospective Internet-based economy that they term "Wikinomics" would depend on the principles of openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally. They identify seven Web 2.0 business-models (peer pioneers, ideagoras, prosumers , new Alexandrians, platforms for participation, global plantfloor, wiki workplace). [ citation needed ]
Organizations could make use of these principles and models in order to prosper with the help of Web 2.0-like applications: Companies can design and assemble products with their customers, and in some cases customers can do the majority of the value creation [18] In each instance the traditionally passive buyers of editorial and advertising take active, participatory roles in value creation. [19] Tapscott and Williams suggest business strategies as models where masses of consumers, employees, suppliers, business partners, and even competitors cocreate value in the absence of direct managerial control
Tapscott and Williams see the outcome as an economic democracy.
Some other views in the scientific debate agree with Tapscott and Williams that value-creation increasingly depends on harnessing open source/content, networking, sharing, and peering, but disagree that this will result in an economic democracy, predicting a subtle form and deepening of exploitation, in which Internet-based global outsourcing reduces labour-costs. In such a view, the economic implications of a new web might include on the one hand the emergence of new business-models based on global outsourcing, whereas on the other hand non-commercial online platforms could undermine profit-making and anticipate a co-operative economy. For example, Tiziana Terranova speaks of "free labor" (performed without payment) in the case where prosumers produce surplus value in the circulation-sphere of the cultural industries [21]
Given the lack of set standards as to what "Web 2.0" actually means, implies or requires, the term can mean radically different things to different people.
The argument exists that "Web 2.0" does not represent a new version of the World Wide Web at all, but merely continues to use so-called "Web 1.0" technologies and concepts. Note that techniques such as Ajax do not replace underlying protocols like HTTP , but add an additional layer of abstraction on top of them. Many of the ideas of Web 2.0 had already featured in implementations on networked systems well before the term "Web 2.0" emerged. Amazon.com , for instance, has allowed users to write reviews and consumer guides since its launch in 1995, in a form of self-publishing. Amazon also opened its API to outside developers in 2002. [22] Previous developments also came from research in computer-supported collaborative learning and computer-supported cooperative work and from established products like Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino .
In a podcast interview Tim Berners-Lee described the term "Web 2.0" as a "piece of jargon": "nobody really knows what it means"; and went on to say "if Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along." [5]
Conversely, when someone proclaims a website "Web 2.0" for the use of some trivial feature (such as blogs or gradient -boxes) observers may generally consider it more an attempt at promotion than an actual endorsement of the ideas behind Web 2.0. "Web 2.0" in such circumstances has sometimes sunk simply to the status of a marketing buzzword , which can mean whatever a salesperson wants it to mean, with little connection to most of the worthy but (currently) unrelated ideas originally brought together under the "Web 2.0" banner.
Other criticism has included the term "a second bubble," (referring to the Dot-com bubble of circa 1995=2001), suggesting that too many Web 2.0 companies attempt to develop the same product with a lack of business models. The Economist has written of "Bubble 2.0." [23]
Venture capitalist Josh Kopelman noted that Web 2.0 excited only 53,651 people (the number of subscribers to TechCrunch , a Weblog covering Web 2.0 matters), too few users to make them an economically-viable target for consumer applications. [24]