The Web matured over night to what is now popularly being described as a new version of the web or Web 2.0! It is now clearly a collaborative tool that encourages new age of web development and design on a platform of communication, interoperability and information sharing to even a regular user of the internet. The most obvious examples of which can be seen (for example) in Facebook- a social networking site and YouTube-a video sharing site.
Its clear that the buzzwords like web standards, blogging, long tail, tagging, peer to peer (to name a few) are here to stay, and what it has done is taken the power from the hands of say web developers and put it in the hands of the “non-technical web user.”
Hotmail started losing sheen to Yahoo Mail which in turn lost out to Google mail; where Photobucket was hugely popular and then before you knew it everyone was on Flickr, where Encarta completely lost out to the incredible power and scope of the necessary Wikipedia!
The main feature of Web 2.0 is the fact that it works on Open Data formats, where users create data, Users own their data, they have the ability to use the data outside of applications on the particular site and the data can be used across devices
In addition, everything looks pretty! With its rich user interface, ease of use, access to build social networks, and best of all is that it functions on the traditional application substrate.
Web 2.0 aims for the user to produce and host content as well as allow it to be consumed by interested people. It works on core technologies like Open Date creation through APIs and web services, RSS, AJAX, and web standards (XHTML, CSS)
Here existing technology has been used to revolutionize the web, making it innovation at its best. It’s clearly an exciting time for web developers, it’s great place to snap up talent in a recessionist market, and start ups are beginning to tickle the interest of investors.
The web is no longer a document delivery system, but is clearly an application platform. Everyone is doing everything online!