Web 2 is a concept revealed by a discussion between O'Reilly and Media Live international in the year 2004. It is a powerful and strong blending of different technologies, applied to raise sharing of information, user interaction, creativity, innovation and desktop experience.
The term Web 2 is commonly associated with web applications that facilitate interactive systemic biases,
interoperability, user-centered design, and developing the World Wide Web. It allows users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as consumers of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to websites where users (presumes) are limited to the active viewing of content that they created and controlled. It is a move away from, and beyond, static web pages that we are all familiar with. It's the movement to dynamic and shareable content, as well as social networking. It includes social bookmarking, blogs, and other applications, etc.
The client-side/web browser technologies used in Web 2 development are Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax), Adobe Flash and the Adobe Flex framework, and JavaScript/Ajax frameworks such as Yahoo! UI Library, Dojo Toolkit, Moo-Tools, and j-Query. Ajax programming uses JavaScript to upload and download new data from the web server without undergoing a full page reload. Web 2 can be described in 3 parts which are as follows:
Rich Internet Application (RIA) - It defines the experience brought from desktop to browser whether it is from a graphical point of view or usability point of view. Some buzz words related to RIA are AJAX and Flash.
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) - It is a key piece in Web 2 which defines how Web 2 applications expose its functionality so that other applications can leverage and integrate the functionality providing a set of much richer applications (Examples are: Feeds, RSS, Web Services, Mash-ups).
Social Web - It defines how Web 2 tends to interact much more with the end user and making the end user an integral part.
It provides a web platform that is highly functional in obtaining and implementing sales strategies. Its development enables better use of the core enterprise application. You can make use of semantic tagging technology that can raise the navigation of internal and external web pages, thereby leading to increased sales of products/services. It very well targets the marketing resources, hastens the product development life cycle, and gives apt feedback of the new products. It uses its users and bloggers for establishing a positive image and creating positive publicity among the masses. It makes the Internet marketing a compulsory process so that your marketing budget is used to its best. It improves the quality of social interaction for anyone across the globe. Here, views, experiences, recipes, thoughts, comments, etc are easily exchanged.
The world has become a smaller place thanks to the Internet. We cannot imagine a day without browsing the net. If for nothing, we at least visit some of our favorite sites, read some tweets or write remarks on others wall. But not so long back in the past, the Internet was not so complicated. It was just about browsing sites and reading information. So what has changed between now and then, well the technology is one for sure. That is what this web 2 VS web 1 websites argument is all about.
Traditionally, websites were portals of information. If you wanted to learn more about some topic or read news or get any information you opened a website. It was a passive experience with just one way communication. You could of course click on the various links, but they just opened new pages that you could read. It was all about gathering information. This is what the industry today calls as Web1 websites.
The more modern trends have been quite different. The social networking sites are some of the most common and popular names in today's world. The stark difference between these sites and the older web 1 sites is that these sites are more interactive. You can not just read information, but you can also post your own information or thoughts there too. It has become a two way communication channel. Some sites like social networking ones have extended it a step further and made it multi way communication or social networking as it is called. This is Web2 era and such sites are web2 sites.
The other big bang from the Web2 technology has been blogs. Now, individuals do not strive to make great looking homepages: that is Web 1, but are focusing on getting more traffic on their blogs, that is Web 2. With blogs, you can express your views and people comment on them. That is classic Web 2 interactive web browsing experience.
When you look at these differences you could find the web 2 VS web 1 argument to be like a comparison between lectures and conversations. Web 1 sites are like lectures, where you listen to a single source. The Web2 sites are more like a conversation where you listen and respond too. The difference is subtle but as we all can see, the results are quite different.
