The advent of the PC and the internet have radically changed the way we live, communicate and collaborate. These two inventions allowed us as individuals to create and edit our own content. The advancement in microprocessor design and arrival of Microsoft and Apple on the playing field gave us a device that allowed both expert and non-expert users to leverage the computer to do general purpose tasks like word processing, simple data crunching and mathematical computations, uploading pictures and making videos. However it was the rise of the internet that allowed us to share all this content and collaborate with people living in disparate corners of the world in real time. In web 1.0 we had very little dynamic content on the web pages. We browsed the page requested for content. The content would be then sent to some server at the backend, processed and presented to us. The model was more of a client server model where the user read the web and the servers and those that created the content on those servers produced the pages. Over the last few years however a silent revolution has changed the way we use the web. Web 2.0 has arrived quietly.
The word web 2.0 was coined at a conference between O’Reilly and Media live international. O’Reilly’s official definition of the term reads as follows –
| "Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an "architecture of participation," and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences." |
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| Web 1.0 | | Web 2.0 |
| DoubleClick | --> | Google AdSense |
| Ofoto | --> | Flickr |
| Akamai | --> | BitTorrent |
| mp3.com | --> | Napster |
| Britannica Online | --> | Wikipedia |
| personal websites | --> | blogging |
| evite | --> | upcoming.org and EVDB |
| domain name speculation | --> | search engine optimization |
| page views | --> | cost per click |
| screen scraping | --> | web services |
| publishing | --> | participation |
| content management systems | --> | wikis |
| directories (taxonomy) | --> | tagging ("folksonomy") |
| stickiness | --> | syndication |
What are some of the things that had the biggest contribution to make in this second innings of the World Wide Web?
Google undoubtedly was the forerunner of this change. It provided the fastest and most efficient way to search content on the web. Getting fast and efficient access to information was a great equalizer. It gave the power to a student in Philippines, a house wife in India and a chef in Russia to inform themselves of whatever they wanted whenever they wanted it. The availability of this information to anyone anywhere was a big equalizer. Google’s patented page ranking technology measures the relative weight of the page and organizes search results in the order of their rank. It estimates a pages importance by counting the number and the importance of pages that have a hyperlink to it. Approximately 91 million searches are made on Google every day and most searches take less than 0.2 seconds. Fast searches amount to saving on money for customers that log in using a dial up connection.
Google was also one of the first to adopt and push Ajax technology in a big way. Most of the products that Google introduced – Google Maps, Gmail, Orkut are Ajax applications. Jesse James Garrett’s paper on Ajax is an interesting read. Search engines, email, maps, desktop searches and photo editing software Google has branched out into several forays but their motto for everything they do is “Keep it simple and give users only what they want”. There are no licenses and software upgrades. Google symbolizes the three key elements of Web 2.0 – democracy, simple to use applications and constant innovation.
2.
You tube allows users to upload videos completely free of cost. Approximately 100 million clips are viewed everyday on YouTube. It accepts videos in wmv, avi, mov and mpeg formats and displays them in Flash video format. YouTube is a sharing network and allows users to share videos wither publicly or privately (public videos can be seen by everyone and private videos are seen only by the people that receive the private URL). TIME magazine named it the “invention of the year for 2006”. In one of its biggest acquisitions Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in October last year.
3. Blogging
The Blogging or Web logging phenomenon one of the most touted outcomes of Web 2.0. A blog in its simplest form is an online journal or a personal diary. There are millions of blogs over the internet covering a huge range of topics from technology to movies and from mother’s day to presidential elections. Listed below are some interesting blogs sites: The other thing that has led to the popularity of blogs is RSS feeds. RSS stands for real simple syndication. RSS aware software has programs called RSS feed readers. The user then subscribes to a feed by entering the link of the feed into the reader program. The reader checks to see if any of those feeds have new content since the last time it was checked and if there is then that content is fetched.
4. Wiki’s
Wiki’s are software that allows users to edit the contents of a web page using any web browser. Wiki’s can contain hyperlinks and text. Wikipedia one of the most popular websites today is an online encyclopedia where users can add and modify content easily.
5. The networks
When the first networks sprung up a couple of decades ago their primary function was to provide fast and efficient pipes to transfer the data packets from one place to another. Today however networks are a lot more than just pipes and plumbing.
- A lot of intelligence is built into the networks The internet brings with it great promise and also great risk. Securing data is the topmost concern of CEO’s world over. A lot of mission critical business applications are run over the networks. The network therefore should have the ability to identify, respond and adapt to threats in a proactive manner. Attacks are getting more sophisticated and the time it takes for an attack to propagate and multiply is reducing. Security needs to be inbuilt into every aspect of the network.
- Converged networks carry data, voice and video on the same pipe. TDM phones are fast being replaced by IP phones. VoIP (voice over IP) technology enables us to carry voice packets over the existing data network. This has several advantages: lower cabling costs, IT staff needs to have knowledge of just one technology (IP), single vendor. Real-time traffic like voice and video is inherently more sensitive to time delays and packet drops. The networks therefore need to have intelligent ways of prioritizing time sensitive real-time traffic. QoS (quality of service), packet fragmentation, echo cancellation techniques and bandwidth optimization are necessary tools for carrying such traffic.
- A number of advanced technologies are available now that help do things like caching data, optimizing bandwidth by transferring only the delta of change in web pages and not static content, ubiquitous access to network using wireless technology are all part of the network infrastructure today.
Some of the other contributors that helped web 2.0 take off really are
What has happened as a result of globalization and web 2.0 is very significant to countries like India and China. It allows student in India, a housewife in the Philippines and a doctor in China to browse the web, publish white papers, buy books and equipment, and entertain themselves in the same manner. The web has become an equal opportunity provider more than most governments and organizations could.
Famous author and columnist Thomas Friedman said this about globalization –
“Whatever can be done will be done. There are so many more people collaborating out there with so many more technologies. The only question left is that will it be done by you or to you”.
