Define Web 2.0

Mod Note:

This response was in a thread that was actually started by a spammer however as suggested below it contains useful information so I have moved it to a new thread. The original question was

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If you want a textbook definition, Google or Wikipedia it.

I'm offering a "real" perspective based on actual experience dealing with the government and other developers, stakeholders and project managers as part of my daily duties.

Web 2.0, also known as Rich Web 2.0 is the newest generation of development practices to broaden the usage of the Internet (Web 1.0) in 3 major categories:

Social networking
Mashups of web API
Making web apps function more as desktop apps (Ajax)

There are others, but to me those are the big 3.

The first is plainly obvious, i.e. blogs/Wordpress, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, forums and any other web sites that bring people together to interact, sometimes in real time. Closely integrated with RSS and ATOM newsfeed subscriptions, as well as profiles exchanged and searchable between sites, many developers are implementing this software which builds communities and allows for interoperability like never seen before.

Mashups refer to using web Advanced Programming Interfaces (APIs) which allow developers to send requests to other servers and receive content they seamlessly integrate into their web site. These days people call such devices widgets or web services, but technically they are all API's traditonally written to use XML or Javascript as the common means of transferring data between the client and host, both platform independent. One quick example is using Google Maps and integrating that into your site, and another more advanced example is creating a site that allows users to sell/buy and track stuff within auctions found on eBay, but designing it to look/feel as the developer wants with all data stored on eBays servers and queried via the API.

The final category is really all about Ajax and similar technologies where web applications look and function more like desktop applications. Developers have access to all kinds of modern frameworks across many platforms for customizing GUI's that make web sites much more usable, intuitive and behave like people are accustomed to using their client computer. Technologies include Ajax/JSON, DHTML, XML-RPC (widgets) and many others.

Some of the concerns about web 2.0 involve who owns the data so there are licensing and copyright issues involved, plus namespace concerns and privacy protection and implementing across government servers.

-jim