Web 2.0 Submitted Monday, March 9, 2009 - 12:41:03 AM by Klaitu
I recently got a question from a family member who is, like most people, only involved in the fringes of technology. It seems my family finds me weird (go figure) and every time I go to a family gathering or see one of them I haven't seen in awhile, they always ask me "How is school going?" and "What is it you do again?".
Well, this time the question is "What makes Web 2.0 different than Web 1.0, and what does that mean?" I thought it was a pretty interesting question, though not exactly timely.. so I thought I would lay out what this Web 2.0 stuff is all about in non-technical terms.. not that any of my family actually reads Special K.
I could start with the history of the Internet, but I won't go that far. Suffice to say that the government invented the Internet for the military, but it grew to include universities, and eventually in the 1990's it exploded into what people think of today as "The Internet" or "The World Wide Web".
To understand Web 2.0, you have to understand the original. When the web first started out, it was a method for people to publish information, and other people to read it. For the most part, this process was one-way. In example: I make a website, and then you read that website. This is the era around 1995, when America Online, Prodigy, and Compuserve all provided dialup internet access and e-mail over the internet.
In this era, websites were of a more simple design (because dialup is slow) and the internet wasn't as pervasive in society as today.. but then came the "dot com giants".
Giants like ebay and yahoo. People started using the internet to do things instead of just using the internet to send baby pictures back and forth, or read mandarin chicken recipes.
The internet just sort of.. progressed from there. There was a push to make things more "interactive". Message boards became popular in the late 1990s. Message boards are a sort of community e-mail where people can discuss things in a public forum. You post something, someone reads it and replies about it.. and a conversation happens.
Then there was the "dot com bust" which I won't explain in detail here, but it took down a lot of internet companies.. and then we started to hear about "Web 2.0".
So, what is Web 2.0 and how is it different? Here's the deal, web 2.0 is a design philosophy. It has nothing to do with different technologies. It's using the same technology in new ways to make things "integrated" and "more interactive than ever".
I'll use Youtube as an example. The part of youtube that most people recognize is that is is a place you can find videos of.. just about anything. That's the "web 1.0" part. Also on Youtube, you can post your own videos, write descriptions for them, and have other people comment on your videos. You can also comment on other people's videos, and rate them on how much you like them. The way you rate the videos influences how much advertising that video recieves, and the most popular videos get put on the front page of Youtube, and exposed to the most people.
Web 2.0 happens when the web allows people to collaborate as a community.
Amazon.com is another example. Sure, you can go to amazon and just buy something. That's the web 1.0 part, but you can also rate items that you own, and write reviews of items, which influence other people. When you buy something on Amazon, the computer enters that into a database, and then makes recommendations to other people based on what you bought...
For instance, if you bought and Orson Scott Card novel, Amazon could recommend to you a similar author such as Robert Heinlein because it knows that people who buy Orson Scott Card stuff also buy Heinlein stuff. It's the same way it knows that if you bought Spider Man 1, you might also want Spider Man 2 or Ironman. That's web 2.0.
Another thing that is web 2.0 is Facebook and Myspace. In web 1.0 we had geocities webpages which were complicated and difficult to understand for the basic user. They also weren't interactive.
Now you can share videos and pictures and music with tons of people, or comment on someone else's profile as easy as cake. That's web 2.0.
In recent years, Web 2.0 has achieved a sort of cult status.. no longer being relegated as a design philosophy, Web 2.0 is now a force of nature. Sites take the idea of Web 2.0 and take it to a ridiculous extreme.
There are sites that can take a text message from your phone, and then repeat it out to millions of people. There are sites which feature nothing but camera footage from a guy who has a webcam on his glasses. There are sites that are a sort of "web war" where you trick people into clicking on a link, and the link counts how many people you tricked into clicking on it.
At the end of the day, Web 2.0 is just a popular idea of how websites should be run. It is characterized by complicated webpages which are machine-generated. A web 2.0 page uses computers to aggregate data and control what each user sees based on what they have done in the past. web 2.0 pages often allow users to offer their opinions of other people's work. In general, web 2.0 pages make it easier for individuals in a community to contribute to the site.
Personally, I'm split on web 2.0, depending on how it's used. Amazon uses web 2.0 to an effective purpose, for example.. but most web 2.0 sites are designed to let boring, ordinary people express themselves and feel like their opinion matters, even though it actually doesn't matter any more than it did before the internet was invented.
As for the irony of that last paragraph appearing in what is essentially a blog post, I'll say this: I'm under no illusion that my opinion matters, or that any one really cares about it. I write Special K for my own purposes, and if other people want to come along for the ride, they're welcome to.
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