How Do We Define Web 2.0?

I'm as dumb as a sack of hammers. The Wikipedia definition may as well be in Hindi or Urdu.

Roland, Richard and you, Will, offer definitions of Web 2.0 that are a bit easier for plain folks to understand, but I'd like to know more about what the features actually mean.

For example, I manage a small widget business. How does Web 2.0 either save me money, make me money or make my life more complete? Assume I just paid the nice man to develop me an olde style website? Do I have to throw it out and get a newer 2.0 model?

Jackson

Ean has a good point. It's easy for us to talk about how design and coding will change with the coming of Web 2.0. But what are going to be the pratical applications for it? What will be the compelling reason for me to get somebody to do this for me? If I change over, what's the cost/value relationship - reduced browsing time (with AJAX I'm sure) leading to faster transactions, etc.

If you think about it, when Web 1.0 was still in its youth and we can all remember the dot com bubble, companies were going out and burining their wallets on those college graduates and technology experts that knew that stuff like the back of their hand. As people started to learn it and the process got easier, there wasn't much of a need. I think the re-emergence of that will show itself in some way, but that's only if the corporate world can find that compelling reason to transfer.

What the web needs is a halt to development, not further development.

How many people would want electricity connnected to their homes if the electrical engineers changed the voltage every 6 months? Buy a television if broadcasting standards changed as fast as wikipedia entries? Use a telephone if the language changed like C++ libraries?

The infrastructure must become static in order for the content to really go mass-market.

Is 110V the best technical solution? Does NTSC really offer the optimum viewing experience? Is English a superior language to Esperanto? No, no and no. But it's better to leave these imperfect implementations alone and let people get on with the truly important business of cooking their meals, or watching their nightly newscast or talking to their friends.

Constant change interferes with the global delivery of useful content. HTML2.0 was good enough.

Everywhere you turn you see the words "web 2.0." But, what is Web 2.0?

Web 2.0 is new speak techno-jargon that is utterly meaningless to all but the ignorant.

Let's face it,Web 2.0 is just the web [full stop]. Anyone that has really worked in web development has been building 'web 2.0' applications for years. Web 2.0 is not a new version of the web, or even a new way of looking at the web. It is simply (based on the definitions I have read) an arbitrary name slapped on the current way of doing things (which isn't much different from the way we did things 3 years -or longer- ago).

There wasn't a single event or day when the web magically transformed from version 1.x to 2.0. The web is still the web. The only difference between the web of today and the web of a few years ago is the access to technology.

The technology of the so called web 2.0 is now more available to more people at costs approaching zero. ('zero' being a relative number compared to the hundreds of thousands required to do the same thing in 1997).

Take for example a community and content management system like Drupal (the same software that runs this site as well as my own). What does Drupal cost? $0. It's free software. Hosting? as little as $5 a month (I happen to have free hosting for my site at the moment). Graphic design? You can purchase a design, or spend some of your time developing your own, or failing time and money - there are dozens of free designs available for download.

So what do you get for all that?

• content management
• xml syndication and aggregation
• collaborative writing tools
• taxonomy and/or folksonomy
• accessible design
• interactive fora (whether in the form of a traditional forum or blog comments)
• etc. etc. etc.

In other words - for next to nothing - you get all the tools and features previously reserved to only the geekiest, knowledgeable, or well financially backed in the world. Truly, the democratization of the web.

But, this isn't new. Not new enough to slap a label on it like web 2.0. After all this was the guarantee of the web all along. The people shall inherit all media and be given control over their content. The people shall be granted the power to form communities that transcend geo-political and social borders. The people shall be granted non-exclusive rights to publish and consume media without external intervention and without having to overcome restrictive barriers.

So, before we get caught up in the buzzword du jour realize that its nothing special. Its simple the way things are, and the way things should be. But, if you are a marketing type, go ahead and try to get some mileage out of the term now - before people catch on.

andre

I always see Ajax coupled w/ Web 2.0 discussions as if it will bring about a great revolution. There is no doubt that it is great (I'm not knocking it), but I don't think that it does us much good when we start losing an audience due to older broswers.

Web 2.0 means eliminating the notion of 'site' and truly thinking of your product as a platform. Always think 'how can this be reused elsewhere?' 'How can others sink their teeth into this?'

We're really at a point where we can do that now on the cheap and quick.

I'll assume, for the moment, that AJAX (for lack of a shorter term) is not a *required* component of Web 2.0.

Having read what I could find in an hour's time, I have to agree with Andre, above. Developers "in the know" have been working this way for at least a year now, and in some cases 2 or 3 years. Only Microsoft likes transitions to take that long; the web is supposed to be a fast adopter, isn't it?

No sir, I don't think this is Web 2.0 - perhaps Web 1.5 would be more accurate at this point.

If and when Web 2.0 comes about, it will not be because of server-side changes pushing additional client-side software. It will be because client-side software (the browser, currently) will finally become an engine worthy of the name. Web 2.0 will happen not when developers start writing easy-to-use libraries of cross-platform, accessible AJAX code, but when terms like "cross-platform", "browscap.ini", and "noscript" become archaic.

Your browser probably has a couple of plugins installed right now. Flash, almost certainly, probably Java and Quicktime too. When a site wants to use one of those, the container has to be square. It's not searchable by the engines (Google and the like, no fair counting your built-in site search engine!). They are usually not accessible. They often require different code for different browsers. Not everyone has them.

Web 2.0 will happen when the client-side software can not only display movies (in a common format - MP4 seems to be the best size/quality tradeoff right now), do complex interactive and scripted animations, and perform hard math and simulations at a reasonable speed, but be able to do them without arbitrary and invincible rectangular borders, listen to CSS, and be built into the software. Flash can be thrown away as soon as Javascript (or it's future replacement) is secure enough that everyone leaves it turned on. Script should be JIT compiled before execution if flagged as compilable by the developer.

Web 2.0 means we can have complex, dynamic browser behaviour out of the box. When Flash and Java can be replaced by JIT-compiled scripts, we're almost there. When movie and audio objects are built into the Web 2.0 browser and work on every OS, we're almost there. When developers don't have to waste time writing "noscript" tags and alternate sites for non-Java or non-Flash users, we're almost there.

But when all of those conditions happen at once, *then* I'll believe in Web 2.0.

Until then, it's just Web Enhanced - WebX, or WebNT, or maybe even Web98. But not Web 2.0.

*Sorry for the length.*