Web 2.0 Development

“Web 2.0″ refers to the second generation of web development and web design that facilitates information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design and collaboration on the World Wide Web. The advent of Web 2.0 led to the development and evolution of web-based communities, hosted services, and web applications. Examples include social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashups and folksonomies.
The term is now closely associated with Tim O’Reilly because of the O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but rather to cumulative changes in the ways software developers and end-users use the Web.

Web 2.0 Characteristics

Web 2.0 websites allow users to do more than just retrieve information. They can build on the interactive facilities of “Web 1.0″ to provide “Network as platform” computing, allowing users to run software-applications entirely through a browser. Users can own the data on a Web 2.0 site and exercise control over that data. These sites may have an “Architecture of participation” that encourages users to add value to the application as they use it. This stands in contrast to traditional websites, the sort that limited visitors to viewing and whose content only the site’s owner could modify. Web 2.0 sites often feature a rich, user-friendly interface based on Ajax and similar client-side interactivity frameworks, or full client-server application frameworks such as Open Laszlo, Flex, and the ZK framework.
The impossibility of excluding group-members who don’t contribute to the provision of goods from sharing profits gives rise to the possibility that rational members will prefer to withhold their contribution of effort and free-ride on the contribution of others. This requires what is sometimes called Radical Trust by the management of the website. According to Best, the characteristics of Web 2.0 are: rich user experience, user participation, dynamic content, metadata, web standards and scalability. Further characteristics, such as openness, freedom and collective intelligence by way of user participation, can also be viewed as essential attributes of Web 2.0

Web 2.0 Technology

The sometimes complex and continually evolving technology infrastructure of Web 2.0 includes server-software, content-syndication, messaging-protocols, standards-oriented browsers with plug-in and extensions, and various client-applications. The differing, yet complementary approaches of such elements provide Web 2.0 sites with information-storage, creation, and dissemination challenges and capabilities that go beyond what the public formerly expected in the environment of the so-called “Web 1.0″.
Web 2.0 websites typically include some of the following features/techniques.

Search

The ease of finding information through keyword search.

Links

Ad-hoc guides to other relevant information.

Authoring

The ability to create constantly updating content over a platform that is shifted from being the creation of a few to being constantly updated, interlinked work. In wikis, the content is iterative in the sense that users undo and redo each other’s work. In blogs, content is cumulative in that posts and comments of individuals are accumulated over time.

Tags

Categorization of content by creating tags: simple, one-word user-determined descriptions to facilitate searching and avoid rigid, pre-made categories.

Extensions

Powerful algorithms that leverage the Web as an application platform as well as a document server.

Signals

The use of RSS technology to rapidly notify users of content changes.