The term Web 2.0 was coined by Tim O'Reilly and Dale Dougherty of O'Reilly Media in early 2004. O'Reilly and Dougherty saw Web 2.0 as an evolution of the original web. They created the Web 2.0 Meme Map graphic below to document these new concepts. Places like Flickr, Blogspot, Wikipedia, 37Signals, and AjAXWrite are just a few web sites that embody the Web 2.0 paradigm. I thought I would spend some time talking about what Web 2.0 implies about the evolution of our Internet experience. A Web 2.0 paradigm is a collection of at least five attributes: Applications rather than pages, dynamic interface, service couplings, incremental improvement and user participation.

Applications Rather Than Pages

Web 2.0 sites are more like to be applications rather than just pages of information. Internet and HTML technologies have improved to the point where a web site can perform a task for you. Activities like reading and writing email, maintaining a blog, creating and collaborating on a document, storing digital pictures, or maintaining a project plan can all be done at various web sites. The web-based application allows you to work from anywhere on almost any kind of internet-attached computer and yet have all your data available.

Dynamic Interface

Web and HTML technologies have evolved in the past year or so to allow a web-based user interface to respond in a much smoother and quicker fashion to user inputs. These technologies generally lumped under the umbrella term of AJAX give a web application a smoother, more dynamic feel, much like that of a locally installed application.

Service Couplings

A Web 2.0 application may be built on top of one or more existing web-based applications to provide a new capability. There are many map-based applications such as Frappr, Housingmaps, and IncidentLog which add data to maps they obtain from the Google's Map services. Google encourages this integration by publishing the details of interfacing with Google Maps so any programmer can mapping to their application, web-based or not. Amazon and Flickr are other examples of web sites who are providing access their data for other applications to build on.

Incremental Improvements

Regular improvements and feature additions are a feature Web 2.0 applications. Rather than not releasing a Web 2.0 application until it is completely ready, developers start the site with a small set of features and add features and bug fixes on a regular basis. This mode of programming gets applications out to users sooner and involves the user in the feedback mechanism about which features should be added or fixed.

User Participation

More than anything else, Web 2.0 applications are about user participation. Some Web 2.0 applications are tools for users to generate their own content while others solicit user feedback in an effort to help guide the evolution of their product. Most Web 2.0 applications also host a blog and a forum which serve as communications channels between the developers and the community of users of their application.

The innovations in Web and Internet technologies that we call Web 2.0 are enabling a whole new generation of applications and providing new life for the old-timers already on the web.