Web 2.0 Definition and Solutions

Why is Web 2.0 such a big deal?

What are the Web 2.0 technologies?

What do those technologies let you do?

How does Web 2.0 change the user experience?

How can Web 2.0 benefit my business?

What’s the borderline between the hype and the promise?

It’s always difficult to get past technology buzzwords. Even when the subject holds real merit, the hype machines quickly throw the subject out of whack, making it difficult to distinguish between the fad and the original promise. Public relations professionals, anxious to link their new product to a “hot new technology,” appropriate the term even when it doesn’t actually apply. Industry articles claim that the new buzzword-enabled technology will forever change the face of computing. You begin to expect to hear that a woman has named her baby after it, and that, at the end of the cycle, the technology will be blamed for global warming.

This phenomenon certainly applies to the family of technologies and services that are bundled together under the Web 2.0 umbrella. In this article, we’ll summarize the key points to illuminate what Web 2.0 is—and what it isn’t—so that you can put it to use in your business.

Why is Web 2.0 such a big deal?

Let’s start with the high-level view. Many consider Web 2.0 to be a major shift in computing because in the new paradigm, the Internet itself becomes the computing platform. That is, a “true” Web 2.0 application—whatever that is—would be indistinguishable from a desktop application. Like a desktop program, the ultimate Web 2.0 application would have immediate feedback and would update information without a deliberate refresh. In this context, you’ll sometimes see these applications called rich Internet applications (RIAs).

But Web 2.0 isn’t meant to be a one-to-one replacement for the applications you run on your desktop. The new breed of application, which runs primarily on Internet servers and company intranets, is generally understood to be dynamic (that is, content updates automatically) and collaborative (drawing information from multiple sources and from user contribution), embraces the long tail (that is, appeals to smaller niches in the community and not just the largest audience)—and still remains simple and intuitive.

It can be helpful to draw a line between the software development technologies generally associated with Web 2.0, and the functionality that those technologies let programmers achieve. The technologies—we’ll get to those in a moment—are simply tools that enable programmers to put up a website that, one hopes, improves the user experience. If programmers can accomplish the same goals using an “old” technology or, heck, using chicken wire and an old coat hanger, the site is no less a “Web 2.0” site.

I won’t inundate you with references to additional reading (since you came here to get the broad overview), but it’s probably important to at least glance at the seminal definition of Web 2.0, at least in the eyes of one of the people who crafted its name, and called Web 2.0 “the new conventional wisdom.” In What Is Web 2.0, Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, clarifies its principles and practices. He also said recently, “Web 2.0 is ultimately a tipping point, not a starting point. And it’s about business models and social adoption rates, as much as it is about technology.”

What are the Web 2.0 technologies?

To many managers, the biggest surprise is that Web 2.0 isn’t based on a just-invented new technology. Rather, it’s based on a clever repackaging of older technologies, tied to an “Aha!” of attitude.

That “Aha!” was first uttered by Jesse James Garrett in February 2005, and immortalized online in his essay, Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications. In it, he explained the Ajax collection of Web development techniques—asynchronous JavaScript and XML—as a way to create interactive Web applications.

You’re probably moderately familiar with each of these components, at least well enough to nod along when your development staff mentions the terms. (If not, it’s time for a quick refresher course, which we won’t endeavor to supply here.) CSS and HTML (or XHTML) are used to control the presentation of data on the webpage.

The client-side scripting language, usually JavaScript or JScript, dynamically displays and interacts with the information presented. The golden key is the JavaScript XMLHttpRequest object, which gives developers the ability to make a page exchange data asynchronously with the Web server. (Some Ajax frameworks use an IFrame object instead of XMLHttpRequest, but don’t let that distract you; the intent is the same.) As a manager, you don’t have to know about the grand inner workings of XMLHttpRequest; the important bit to understand is that it lets a webpage keep data in sync with information stored on a company server, using a business partner’s Web service, or from any public online entity that makes the information available.

Data is generally stored and exchanged using XML, often in conjunction with Web services. Other data interchange formats will work as long as they support some form of server-side scripting.

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Developers can work with Ajax or other Web development tools in a brute-force manner. Or they can use an ever-expanding number of tools and frameworks that let them add Web 2.0 features to their existing development environment. It’s probable that the development tools your company uses are already supported.

Another element in the Web 2.0 development scheme is the use of open application program interfaces (APIs). The underlying code may not be open source in any true definition of that term, but APIs provide access to a site’s underlying data and system dynamics. That’s what makes it feasible for a developer to create, say, a unique view of book sales data; she can leverage Amazon Web Services via the associated API.

If those technologies are all a bit new to you, and you come from an older era of data processing, you may be more comfortable with an alternate visualization. Think of Web 2.0 in ancient UNIX terms: pipes and redirects connecting the output of lots of smaller tools and processes—the Web as monster collection of shell scripts, if you will.

That sounds a bit like a techniques lecture given to programmers. If you’re not personally involved with software development, your attention may be beginning to fray. Never fear: That’s all the programmer-speak we’re going to use. Because Web 2.0 isn’t truly defined by the use of Ajax. What matters is what it lets you achieve.

Why is Web 2.0 such a big deal?

What are the Web 2.0 technologies?

What do those technologies let you do?

How does Web 2.0 change the user experience?

How can Web 2.0 benefit my business?

What’s the borderline between the hype and the promise?

What do those technologies let you do?

Ajax is just the screwdriver that lets a programmer affix certain behaviors to a website. The common elements that help define a site as Web 2.0—at least superficially—include mashups, real-time data feeds, tagging, user-generated content and resource sharing.

Mashups is a relatively new term for a Web function that’s been around for a while: aggregating elements from several online sources on a single webpage. If your personal homepage automatically includes a box showing the local weather prediction, technically your site is a mashup (though a rather lame one).

However, mashups are generally meant to be an integral source of the site’s value, not a convenient or gratuitous add-on. Also, they usually combine existing data in a new and useful way, such as connecting Google maps with Craigslist rental listings to help a site viewer locate a new home, or a graph connecting publicly available demographic data to zip codes, or a restaurant-finder using address data and Yahoo’s restaurant listings.

Real-time data feeds provide an ongoing stream of information. Usually the data is from an external source, such as an ever-changing text box showing the latest news items or a site element that links to the most popular photos. However, the data feed could just as easily show corporate data, such as the latest software build status, network uptime or other dashboard-like features.

Standard websites use a designer’s structure, called a taxonomy, to organize how information is found and displayed on a website. Instead, Web 2.0 sites often use tags, which are simply words chosen by the content creator to describe the item. For example, a user might tag her photo “cat, glue, Boston,” to identify the subject, location or situation in the image. Or a blogger might tag his entry with keywords that describe the topic: “politics, Academy Awards, Golden Gate Bridge.” Neither of those users has to decide whether the new content should be shoehorned into “pets” or “tourism,” which might have been the predetermined taxonomy categories.

When tags work, they let users organize data in ways that make sense to them. Plus, they almost instantly become a kind of real-time data feed. Web 2.0 sites often display the most popular tags with font size indicating topic popularity (called a tag cloud), making it a great way to discover interesting things or to spot trends. As with anything else search-related, however, tags aren’t perfect, as they rely on users choosing keywords that others will recognize. Should someone clicking on a San Francisco tag automatically be shown the Golden Gate Bridge tagged item? That’s just one example of the wisdom still to be developed.

The use of tags brings up another key bit of Web 2.0: building a site on user-generated content. Online participation isn’t a new phenomenon; virtual communities have been around since electronic bulletin board services first became popular in the mid-1980s, and companies like CompuServe built their entire business around user-created and -maintained discussion forums. With Web 2.0, however, the community’s contributions become the star, and the site exists only to create and serve those contributions.

That’s certainly true of the myriad photo-sharing sites, for example; without people uploading “me and my dog” pictures, there’s nothing at all to look at. It’s also the case for dozens of websites where people share links to articles and webpages that they think are cool.

In earlier times, most of the user interaction was conversation. With Web 2.0, a large part of the experience is sharing data (files, music, interesting articles, video), ideally in a “remixed” fashion with “rich interactivity”—terms that are intentionally vague and thus open to both cynicism and innovation.

How does Web 2.0 change the user experience?

The point of all the technology and the design principles is, of course, to enhance the way that people interact with one another and with their computer systems. Ideally, Web 2.0 sites (whether built for internal company use or for public consumption) make it easier for people to connect and to learn from one another. The result of the user-generated content, for instance, is said to be “collective intelligence,” or the wisdom that comes from consensus decision-making. (Buzzword-watchers will remember when the hyped term for this was “collaboration.”)

Whether for trivial matters like movie reviews or for important business-changing decisions, the advantage is that people can work and play better, and collectively can make more intelligent decisions.

One side effect of the Web-based rich Internet application, which runs primarily on a hosted server (though the user interface elements run on the client’s Web browser), is that it promotes the notion of “software as a service.” Arguably, whether written for in-house use or acquired from a service vendor, these technologies can make it easier to upgrade and maintain applications, to deal with security issues, and to take advantage of the service-oriented architecture (SOA) capabilities in which your company has invested. Your developers can build applications that rely on publicly available Web services, treating the Internet like a planetary operating system.

Why is Web 2.0 such a big deal?

What are the Web 2.0 technologies?

What do those technologies let you do?

How does Web 2.0 change the user experience?

How can Web 2.0 benefit my business?

What’s the borderline between the hype and the promise?

How can Web 2.0 benefit my business?

To the casual observer, Web 2.0 is primarily a consumer trend. But it’s harder to identify the “obvious” benefits of Web 2.0 for traditional businesses.

Certainly, Web 2.0 is important if you’re building yet another website to share digital photos. It also has business implications if you create business-to-consumer online resources, such as a hotel reservation site in which the user can dynamically change search criteria, and which encourages user-generated content such as hotel reviews. However, Web 2.0 is equally important in business-to-business IT.

For businesses, Web 2.0 often becomes intertwined with SOA and other Web services technologies. (See the CIO tutorial, ABC: An Introduction to SOA, for more on this topic.) The key is to tie the flexibility of Web 2.0 to the service-oriented principles of loose coupling, encapsulation and code reuse.

Web 2.0 creates rich media by integrating data sources and Internet- (and thus intranet-) provided services. That means Web 2.0 can act as a flexible and lightweight user interface, relying on network accessible services that are built on an SOA foundation. The interaction between the two enables businesses to create and manage business processes with greater flexibility. Users can create enterprise mashups by collecting, assembling and sharing existing enterprise content whether to simplify business integration efforts or to provide portals that monitor and improve systems information and transactional flows.

All of this spells benefit for corporations. After all, the drivers that make Web 2.0 compelling to consumers—such as its ability to provide contextualized, personal information, and to use community and social connections to improve communication—are equally important in a business context.

What’s the borderline between the hype and the promise?

One of the first barriers to overcome is the term itself. Some curmudgeonly old-timers in the industry (among which I sometimes include myself) consider the name “Web 2.0” a bit presumptuous. On one hand, the cynics argue, wasn’t the real distinction in the Web’s evolution the point where content and presentation were separated—otherwise known as cascading style sheets (CSS)? Alternately, they say, it’s history’s place to say when the industry evolved to another level, and what we call Web 2.0 may not be significant enough of a change in the long run.

Still, Web 2.0 does mean something, although what it is can be hard to quantify—even for the guy who came up with the term. According to O’Reilly:

A lot of people are wrapping themselves in the Web 2.0 mantle today, and a lot of them don’t understand it. For example, if someone says that they were working with JavaScript and XML (i.e. Ajax), that doesn’t mean that they were working with Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is about harnessing the Internet as a platform, using network effects to make your application get better the more people use it.

Whatever else Web 2.0 is, however, it’s clearly the next stage in what we can do with technology.

Esther Schindler is a senior online editor at CIO.com.

Read more on Web 2.0:

• Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
• Ajax Arrives for the Enterprise
• Urgent Need for Adapting to Web 2.0, Concludes Study