Web 2.0

Web 2.0

WEB 2.0 is the term increasingly being used to describe the next generation World Wide Web. Rising from the ashes of hundreds of dot-com companies that crashed and burned in 2001, new players as well as survivors are using the Web as a platform to create more interactive and collaborative experiences online.

Part of this picture are Web sites that offer software as services over the Internet, much like Writely and many other Web-based word processors that seem to have sprung up overnight.

Tim O'Reilly, IT book publisher and events organizer, coined the term Web 2.0 in 2004 to describe the resurgence of Web sites that followed the industry shakeout.

"The bursting of the dot-com bubble in the fall of 2001 marked a turning point for the Web," he writes. "Many people concluded that the Web was overhyped, when in fact bubbles and consequent shakeouts appear to be a common feature of all technological revolutions. Shakeouts typically mark the point at which an ascendant technology is ready to take its place at center stage. The pretenders are given the bum's rush, the real success stories show their strength, and there begins to be an understanding of what separates one from the other."

To illustrate the differences between the old and new Web, O'Reilly used a list of companies and Web sites. Online advertising pioneer DoubleClick was Web 1.0 while Google AdSense was Web 2.0. Britannica Online was Old World; Wikipedia was New World. Personal Web sites were Web 1.0; blogs were Web 2.0. Where Web 1.0 sites spoke of "stickiness," Web 2.0 sites offered syndication as a way to attract more traffic.

A central characteristic of Web 2.0 is the harnessing of collective intelligence, O'Reilly says. Visitors to a Web 2.0 Web site like Wikipedia or Flickr leave their mark and add to its value. The ascendancy of blogs is another example of this phenomenon. In fact, O'Reilly says, user contributions will be the key to market dominance in the Web 2.0 era.

Finally, O'Reilly says, Web 2.0 will deliver Web-based applications that behave like traditional desktop software.

A key enabler of Web 2.0 is a set of technologies dubbed "Ajax," a combination of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (extensible markup language).

In his influential February 2005 essay "Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications," Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path, a San Francisco-based Web consulting company, writes that the combination of JavaScript and XML is finally enabling Web-based applications to offer users the same type of richness and responsiveness they used to get only from desktop applications.

You may not know it, but you're probably using an Ajax-enabled service already.

One of the first mainstream uses of Ajax is Gmail, Google's free Web-based e-mail. Google also uses Ajax in Google Maps, Google Maps and Google Suggest.

Writely also uses Ajax, as do many other Web-based word processors (including the obviously named ajaxWrite).

Other key players in Ajax are Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, and a small company called 37signals, which is getting a lot of buzz for its collaborative business applications called Basecamp (project management), Campfire (group chat for business), Backpack (for organizing business and personal information), Writeboard (for collaborative writing), and Ta-Da List (shareable to-do lists).

"Over 400,000 people and small businesses use our Web-based applications to get things done the simple way," the company says on its Web site. "Join us and say goodbye to bloated software."

Now that's the kind of idea that may just fly in Web 2.0.

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Manila Standard Today
April 4, 2006

http://www.manilastandardtoday.com/?page=business07_april04_2006