So yesterday I gave a presentation to the Entreprenueral Womens Network in Norwalk Connecticut discussing various online marketing mixes and how they can help build a business online. One of the big questions I was getting was what is Web 2.0. I decided due to the interest in this question I would compile a short article about it.
When the buzzword Web 2.0 first hit us it was used to substitute the term Semantic Web. To many, Web 2.0 strikes them as a new internet and is a brand new concept. While in fact many are already throwing around the term Web 3.0 and other catchy names such as Folksonomy.
The actual phrase itself is believed to have originated in a brainstorming session between O’Reilly and Media live International according to Tim O’ Reilly. (link to article)
Prior to the rise of social networks and dynamic content rich websites the older pages on the internet now referred to as “Web 1.0″ consisted of static Html pages.
As the Internet became a much sought after medium to search for data and interact with one another social networking websites such as myspace.com, digg, shoutwire, del.icio.us and the facebook became very popular across the web.
Many see the web going in the direction of a full service computing platform serving web applications to end users in a way that only desktop applications (software) was able to do up until now. Interacting with websites using “drag and drop” and other desktop application style interaction can be largely attributed to the rise of usage of AJAX. Ajax stands for Asynchronous java script and XML. Up until now because browser technology was too far behind and though the technology which has been around for some time it wasn’t able to be efficiently utilized. The term AJAX was actually coined by Adaptive Path, who is believed to be the first to use the term.
What AJAX does is uses java script to send requests to the web server without causing a full reload of the web page. The drawback to Ajax is that Microsoft’s internet explorer and other web applications handle it their own way. Safari, Firefox, Camino and Opera use a standardized method known as XMLHTTPRequest object while Microsoft Internet Explorer utilizes a technology called active X. Additional examples of successful implementations of Ajax powered applications can be seen by taking a peek at any of the many google applications such as docs.google.com, mail.google.com, and calendar.google.com. These web applications exemplify just how rich the user experience has become. Ajax has allowed these online applications to mimic popular proprietary applications such as the popular Microsoft Office suite.
Continuing down the rabbit hole a bit further you often hear the terms “Rich Media” and “RSS” getting thrown into the hype surrounding the web 2.0 buzz. While there is a great deal to be said about the advancements in Flash and Browser technologies it is important to consider that Ajax, Adobe Flex and OpenLaszlo are newer more robust forms of the familiar Javascript programming language.
Last but surely not least I want to cover RSS and how it truly fits into the web 2.0 bubble. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or “web syndication”. The various forms of RSS such as Atom and RDF are a mixture of XML.
To further illustrate RSS I ask you to consider the following analogy. Imagine a news stand in the morning at your local Coffee Spot. There are many papers each with their headlines bold faced to be read in more detail. RSS doesn’t differ far from this. Sites offering RSS Feeds allow your web browser or RSS reading software to grab headlines and content from several websites and display the headline for your viewing or discarding. Say for example you are interested in reading the latest technology and tech talk but desire to also have your daily news all in the same area. Websites displaying one of the many RSS icons let you know you can subscribe to their Feed.
My personal favorite of RSS readers is Google Reader at the moment. It offers a simple interface which can be easily understand by the masses. Being a Google advocate I try to support their new wave of beta applications and while there are many Rss reader applications out there I gotta stay behind the king of simplicity, Google.
