How Well Do You Know Web 2.0

Everyone is presently talking about Web 2.0, it is the next big blast in the IT industry. But most of the people have only a faint idea of what Web 2.0 is all about. They think of Web 2.0 as an aggregation of websites and fancy web-based applications. What they don't see is the change over of an epitome that Web 2.0 brings and the growth of modern technologies under the roof.

If you ask 10 individuals in the IT industry to define Web 2.0, it is most likely that you will incur 10 unlike answers. This shows one of the major troubles while discussing that Web 2.0 is not a fixed standard or a product but the viewpoint of an individual influenced by his perception. For the users and journalists outside the IT industry, Web 2.0 is a count of applications, websites and interfaces - Google, Flickr.com or even eBay. From a developer's point of view, it is an assemblage of APIs, formats and code.

Many people use the term "Web 2.0" to describe:
• a revitalization in the web economic system
• a new floor for technical interactive processing between websites and services
• or a social phenomena inferred from newfangled online communities and social networks

Web 2.0 is an extensive term that may intend different to different people, but there are two big ideas behind it. The first is the belief of executing software applications on the Web itself rather than on the desktop, as we have since the dawn of the PC. This is a new manner of reckoning the Web, not as a collection of desired sites, but as a set of references, both of data and of functionality, that can all be threaded together to form the applications we require.
The second very big idea is that of involvement, of individuals creating these Web applications more utile even as they work with them. That ordinarily means imparting their own knowledge, by sharing some of the data they modify through these applications.

Web 2.0 usually includes one or more of these components:

• Rich Web Applications in all probabilities are built with the AJAX technology. Despite the fact that Web 2.0 is not only for public websites or applications, there is a large drift to make the internal enterprise applications with web front ends to accomplish platform independence and make it more comfortable to distribute, deal and access business applications.

• SOA, Service Oriented Architecture: SOA means that a website or web application exhibits the functionality through a service most commonly in our world called a web service. This makes the reprocessing services and the design of new applications, the so called mash-ups, very easy.

• Social Web elements: Almost all the Web 2.0 applications extend collaborative and social functionalities that permit users to commit themselves and produce new content. The user takes part in content formation, whether actively or passively.

Web 2.0 is the name rendered to the accumulation of trends that are changing how we all work with the Web, whether as consumers, journalists, software developers or business proprietors. Trends, not the technologies define Web 2.0.

Brought about by the developing community of Web-associated people, the propagation of broadband access, common protocols, and most importantly, our experience with the first generation of Web technologies, we have acquired new things the Web can do, and those new things taken together, define the Web 2.0.