Web 2.0 is about harnessing the potential of the Internet in a more collaborative and peer-to-peer manner with emphasis on social interaction. It has less to do with technology and more to do with a mindset change aimed at facilitating collaborative participation and leveraging the collective intelligence of peers.

The challenge for Web 1.0 (as we now call the earlier wave of Internet) has been to involve the end users in a collaborative, seamless, peer-to-peer fashion in an economical and reliable manner and at the same time ensuring rich user experience.

Rich user experience and a sense of affinity are two critical aspects of Web 2.0 and play an important role in encouraging collaborative information exchange. Customer and partner facing processes using Web 2.0 have the potential to not only radically transform peer-to-peer collaboration, but also inter-entity collaborations and commerceby enabling various types and combinations of business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B), consumer-to-consumer (C2C), business-to-government (B2G), etc. collaboration and commerce.

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.

Web 2.0 – Key Facts

A Web 2.0 website may typically feature a number of the following techniques:

• Rich Internet application techniques, optionally Ajax-based.
• CSS.
• Semantically valid XHTML markup and the use of Microformats.
• Syndication and aggregation of data in RSS/Atom.
• Clean and meaningful URLs.
• Extensive use of folksonomies (in the form of tags or tagclouds, for example).
• Use of wiki software either completely or partially (where partial use may grow to become the complete platform for the site).
• Use of Open source software either completely or partially, such as the LAMP solution stack.
• XACML over SOAP for access control between organisations and domains.
• Weblog (Blogging) publishing.
• Mashups.
• REST or XML Webservice APIs.

Jack Marketing Solutions™ can help you understand what Web 2.0 can do for your organisation. E-mail us today for more information.

Glossary: AJAX, API, Atom, Blog, Business to Business (B2B), Business to Consumer (B2C), CSS, Internet, Internet of Things (IoT), Mashup, Network, Open Source Software, RSS, Tags, URL, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, Web 4.0, Wiki, XHTML, XML