Web 2.0 unraveled

Ok, so what is this web 2.0 all about?

For starters: it isn’t all just a hype. It’s more of an idea of where the web is heading after the dot com collapse.
It was first mentioned by Dale Dougherty, VP of O’Reilly, back in 2004. And since then, it was adopted by the web community at large.

Web 2.0 is built upon 3 pillars:

• Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s) :
  It is the aim of web 2.0 to bring the experience of using a desktop application to the web. No more Godot-like waiting for pages to refresh, no more going from one page to another to traverse all functionalities, … In other words: a web application should be as user-friendly as using a typical desktop application like MS Word. Take a look at the latest Google applications and you’ll see what I mean: Google docs, Google maps, …

• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) :
  SOA is a design principle saying that functionalities that different parties provide on the Internet, can be individually accessed over the Internet by other parties and can be used by these other parties as a part of a new service. Example: NASA has satellite images of virtually any place on the planet. TeleAtlas has loads of digital map data. If both make their services available over the Internet, a party like Google might pick up the idea of using it’s search engine to look for places and show the results on a map by TeleAtlas and a satellite image by NASA

• the social web :
  In Web 2.0, the user is in control. It is the user who provides the content, it is the user who decides what is important and what’s not. Instead of linking documents, the Social Web will link people, organizations, and concepts. For marketeers, this means that the end-user of your product or service now has been given a much stronger voice. Through blogs, podcasts or other publishing channels, the user can make or break you. At the other side, all these new ways of communication can be used by you -the marketeer- as well to reach out to your audience, and possibly a whole range of new audiences. Take for instance a look at the RED page at MySpace or remember the Lonely Girl 15 hype on YouTube…

All three pillars have their own technologies and applications such as AJAX, Flash/Flex, Silverlight, widgets and mash-ups, Twitter, Flickr and Digg and much, much, much more. But that’s for a next time…