Web 2.0 Myth or Reality?

Web 2.0 is one of the hottest topics in the industry today. Observers moving in from other domains will be surprised to know that there is no definition for Web 2.0 standard. More importantly, it is not been standardized yet. But everyone wants to jump into this bandwagon and cash in on the popularity and hype. Well, that is IT industry for you!

What is Web 2.0? Is it just another hyper ware? Is it old wine in new bottles? Are there any strong underlying business or technology ideas that reside within this standard of standards?

We attempt to answer these questions.

Let us state certain facts upfront!
1. Web 2.0 is at best a marketing terminology;
2. The hype factor is certainly high;
3. No one really has a clear definition yet, only a vague idea. Fact remains that not too many people care;
4. There are strong technologies, concepts and ideas behind Web 2.0; and
5. For all you know, we may be facing Bubble 2.0.

On a serious note, Web 2.0 is the term used to describe technologies and concepts that have evolved over the past few years, even those that are evolving as you read these words, which adds value to your web site, portal or web application. 

I think the best way to define Web 2.0 is to define Web 1.0 first.

Web 1.0 is the standard used by web sites, which we saw, in the early days of Internet. Web sites that were meant to serve millions created by a few writers, designers and programmers. These web sites were termed as portals when it did more than just serving content. There were specific applications such as search engines (viz. Google, AltaVista), mail (Hotmail, Yahoo!), E-Commerce (Amazon, Ebay) and messaging (Gaim, MSN).

However, it all meant that the customer (reader or surfer in most cases) was often enticed to visit the web pages of an application. This meant that the user literally typed in the URL and used the web application for specific use.

With Web 2.0, we see a paradigm shift. Web Sites and web applications are not created by a single entity, but through collaborative effort of a huge group of people who are both facilitators as well as consumers.

Consider for example the web site www.43things.com. It is a social network of people who are out there sharing their aspirations, inspirations and plans. The web site content itself is driven by thousands of users. Another example is technorati.com, which thrives on searching and organizing content from blogs created by millions of bloggers.

Yet another example can be Flickr, where people share and use photographs. It is a classic example of the behavioral science concept of social networking. Also, like del.icio.us, which is a place where you can search for bookmarks recommended by other users, the value of Flickr grows when more users participate. That is value for both the application developer as well as the user, which is a win-win situation. Hence, Web 2.0 thrives on a model where more user participation brings down costs while increasing value.

Blogging is another classic example of where publishing is replaced by collaboration. In fact, it is argued that the very relevance of journalism is being threatened by the practice of blogging.

Finally, the promise of moving desktop to web is the crowning glory of the concept that we are calling Web 2.0. Look at www.storyboard.com or www.writely.com; they are trying to replace desktop-based editors and word processors.

Another characteristic of Web 2.0, which is distinct from Web 1.0, is that in Web 2.0 the user often drives traffic. Readers access feeds from web sites and use those feeds rather than visit the web site. A Web 2.0 enabled web application uses XML technologies such as Atom and RSS to reach developers.

Another feature of a Web 2.0 web site is the use of innovative interfaces, which is a huge shift from the run-of-the-mill traditional web user interfaces. Take for example Google Earth which serves up content using a Map as an interface, instead of a regular form driven UI.

What we have seen in the past three years is actually a transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. Just because a web site adheres to some of the standards, such as Ajax, or because it has an RSS feed, it complies with Web 2.0 standard. It is clear that a majority of web sites are in the transition phase.

The Building Blocks

Ajax— Ajax is the most-hyped technology in the web world today. It essentially is a JavaScript-based technology that loads your pages much faster, giving it a desktop like feel. (Read the next article to learn more about Ajax). As we write these lines, there are at least about 100 Ajax-based web sites proudly calling themselves Web 2.0 compliant.

CSS— Cascading Style Sheets is one of the best technologies to arrive that makes your web pages faster yet snazzier. CSS cuts down the lines of markup considerably and makes web pages look much better and more uniform. Since CSS is essentially XML, it forms the base for a Semantic web.

XML— It is XML that glues everything together in Web 2.0. Most technologies evolving as a standard are all XML compliant. XML makes it easy to describe data and separate data from presentation.

Web Services – The promise of web services is finally delivered through Web 2.0. Now the platform is not important; what is important is how the application will deliver. Web Services are packaged and consumed such that a user never really knows whether he has left the web site and gone elsewhere while using the web site or portal. Web Services cut down the cost of development, as the web becomes a collection of components.

The tools
There are a host of web frameworks that are getting Web 2.0 ready. We will discuss a few of them.

1. Ruby on Rails—Ruby is a dynamic programming language, which has several lovely little features that makes it compelling for many developers to switch to. Several hundreds of Java developers have jumped the fence abandoning the tiresome world of EJBs and J2EE and have embraced this new web framework. Rails’ strengths come from some cool ideas like the DRY principle. The DRY principle stands for Don’t Repeat Yourself, which essentially gets the developer to write some logic just once inside an application. Unlike many other frameworks, Rails is very close to the language and is fairly intuitive, claim many of the developers.

2. Turbogears— Turbogears is one of the exciting technologies that have evolved over the past couple of months. It is actually a framework that glues some small Python-based tools. However, as a combination this platform promises a lot. It has learned a lot from Ruby on Rails and is expected to attract more developers in future.

3. ASP.net 3.0— Microsoft has already demonstrated what is in store, much before the current version (2.0) is to be launched. On top of the stack, there is a new technology called Atlas, which seems to be Redmond’s answer to Ajax. Though the framework is another year away, you can trust Microsoft to deliver something that will delight Windows developers.
4. Others— Though we are yet to hear any major announcement from the Sun/Java community, it is likely that a new project may be announced very soon. At the same time, there are several toolkits being developed that can ‘Ajaxify’ an existing Web framework.

End Note

At this point of time, it is difficult to evaluate and predict the future of Web 2.0. We do not even know whether this will result in the next bubble. However, it is for sure that Web 2.0 is good enough for you to call up old customers and ask them to update their web sites and portals. There is money to be made for sure…