What is Web 2.0 30.October.2007
This is an adaptation from a presentation I did back in April of 2007.
Before we talk about Web 2.0, let me show you something. “Business 2.0” magazine. What do you think they mean when they say “Business 2.0”?
The term “Web 2.0” is very similar. It could be interpreted that “Business 2.0” simply means “A New Way to do Business”. Web 2.0 is the same, it is a new better world wide web.
The term “Web 2.0” itself was coined as the name of a conference started in 2004. At first, I thought it was just a hip buzz word, but then I realized how cool many of the new web sites and web applications were. Web 2.0 is fulfilling the promise of what everyone told us the web could do 10 years ago.
10 years ago people said “you can get real time sports scores online”, well you kind of could, you just had to reload every minute you wanted “real time”. Now you just go to NFL.com and you can “watch” a game by seeing the stats from the last play. It is the difference between “Ya that works” and “Yeah, that really works!” Paul Graham puts it best, “Web 2.0 means using the web the way it’s meant to be used.”[2] Before, people were just excited about seeing a picture online, now you have to have an elegant photo album (ala. Lightbox 2). Many of the ingredients in Web 2.0 have been around for years (such as AJAX) but they are just now being baked together in new ways.*
All Visuals?
One of the most obvious aspects of Web 2.0 is the visual trend. From glossy, bubbly logos, to smooth gradients and reflections you can see this exterior face of Web 2.0 everywhere. These visuals are not what constitutes Web 2.0. The Web 2.0 look is merely a design trend that happened at the same time as Web 2.0’s emergence and reflect the simple straight forward attitude that Web 2.0 applications strive for. Just because something is following this trend, doesn’t automatically make it Web 2.0. In all honesty this current design piece will be one of those things we look back on in the future as being “so early 2000s”.
The font shop has good reading on the logos of Web 2.0.
Honest to goodness characteristics of Web 2.0:
When the conference organizers named the first Web 2.0 conference, their meaning was “The web as a platform“. Sure it still means that, but the meaning of the term, just like the description of the conference, has grown every year. Some elements that we see in this new era of the web are:
- Democracy. My Space, Digg, Wikipedia all get better as more people use it. You can find a lot of good articles on all sorts of things. But most of the time you find those articles on many different sites. It encourages participation (comments) and lets people make a valuable contribution and reap the benefits.
- $$$ Web 2.0 is a lot cheaper for the end user and making a lot more money for the company than Web 1.0! We see this in sites from Yahoo! to the New York Times who are dropping the need to pay for some premium content
- Tags as opposed to rigid categories. No longer does one piece of information belong in one category. This creates a free flow of information and ironically everything is less organized, but who cares when you have Google to sort it all out.
- RSS, basically a condensed version of the content from a site. This makes it easy to sites to provide live links to each other or for me to read my favorite websites like I read my email.
- AJAX To avoid getting too technical, AJAX is basically loading new content onto a page so the user doesn’t have to wait for a page refresh. NFL.com’s live game coverage is a great example of this.
- Mashups Combining information from two or more sources into a new site. For an example see wayfaring
- Viral Marketing “You can almost make the case that if a site or product relies on advertising to get the word out, it isn’t Web 2.0.”*
- Beta Everything seems to in a perpetual beta state. I’m sick of “Beta” stickers as much as the next guy, but I love the concept the concept behind it I love: continual improvement.
- Animation It is amazing what smooth animated transitions can do they are not just eye candy. The charts on Google Finance are a great example.
Verses
Speaking of examples, lets look at some difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 sites.
Geocities vs. Blogger
GeoCities was a place where anyone could make a website. How fun! But then you realized “what would I make a website about”? Humm, that’s the hard part. But then blogs hit mainstream and it becomes accepted that you can just make a website with your thoughts, and a link to your photos, oh and don’t bother trying to figure out how to “make a website” just choose one from a list of templates.
MapQuest vs. Google Maps
Remember when you always wished that you could just drag the map just a little bit to the right to see the next block, but instead you had to click the arrow, and when it finally loaded you were disoriented and it turns out you didn’t want to go over that far. Ahh, Google Maps just works.
Weather.com vs. Widgets
Quickly get the weather online–and some ads and the sunrise time and the forecast and when the page finally loads you might be able to find what the temperate tomorrow will be, if you scroll down a bit. Or you hit F12 and get this:
WebMail vs Gmail
Do you remember the first time you used Gmail how much smoother everything worked compared to what you were used to every other time you were forced to check your email through a web browser. What a relief!
Many many sites, like Yahoo!, MapQuest, Ask.com and many more are in the transition of moving all of their legacy applications to new snazy Web 2.0 ways of doing thing. The are developing new services that are Web 2.0 but they still have plenty that haven’t been upgraded.
iTunes/iPod & TiVo vs. CDs & Network TV
Who else is glad they can buy a single track. Do you remember when that wasn’t even possible? “They leverage the power of the web platform, making it a seamless, almost invisible part of their infrastructure.”* And they are platform independent, you can buy songs from your phone, on your computer. You can watch TV when you want. Web 2.0 describes more then just “World Wide Web 2.0” it is a new way to use the internet in general.
Bottom Line
Web Application really are at the heart of the Web 2.0 revolution. “Web developers are finally able to build web applications as rich as local PC-based applications.”* I actually wrote my notes for this presentation in a Web 2.0 application, Google Docs.
How can you tell something is “Web 2.0”? Ask yourself if that kind of website existed before 2001.
Web 2.0 is really a set of principals and practices. An attitude. Web 2.0 is not specific technologies and visuals. The visual layout, and the technologies behind it all, only make the principals and practices easier to realize.
Quoted Sources:
* http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
2 http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html