I love India

Web2.0 is a term that is not understood by many of the internet users which prompted me to write this post.

Internet has evolved a lot since its inception and in constantly undergoing evolution with with time. To explain you the Web2 let me take you the pre-internet time when computers were mostly used for computing and as a storage medium for data. The interaction was between the user and the computer and to a lesser extent between those in that network or organization.

The advent of internet changed this, the data began to be shared across the globe using a web markup language called HTML. It was more like a static news paper or a magazine pages displayed in a monitor with the advantage that you can move across the pages by clicking the links present in a page. At this time new server side languages like PERL, ASP, PHP, etc. came to the fore in modifying or generating a dynamic HTML that was presented to the user.

Now let’s get into the important part of it, the interaction. At all these times the user was able to view the data or pages he wanted but the interaction with page stopped with this. All that a user could do was to contact the author by using the contact form or write his opinion on the guest book maintained in that website. If the user find the page useful then they can bookmark it in their web browser to return later; the process is computer dependent, i.e. the bookmarks will not be available when you use a different computer. At this point of time many instant messengers like yahoo, skype came to be used but that was not using a web browser.

Then came a new class of web2 websites which allowed the users to interact with the webpage in the following ways:

1. Wikis which allow users to edit the content on a page. This was mostly used for collaborative projects popularized by wikipedia.org.
2. Weblogs popularly called as Blogs. Apart from being a tool for sharing ones ideas it allows interaction between different blogs by way of pinging and trackbacks. The user is able to provide his opinion through comment form in a page and the comments gets displayed in the same page.
3. RSS which when expanded is Really Simple Syndication. This is a XML file containing the title, url, and truncated content of a website that can be viewed without visiting the actual website. The users can view this in a RSS reader and can visit only the page or topic they are interested.
4. Podcasts which allow media files like audio, video, etc. to be displayed across internet using the above mentioned RSS.
5. Application programming interfaces (APIs) which allows two servers to exchange data that can be displayed to the users. This is used generally used for retrieving the results of search queries which cannot by captured in RSS.
6. Social Bookmarking which is a advanced form of bookmarking mentioned earlier. Here many social bookmarking sites like digg, del.icio.us, etc. allow users to bookmark sites that will be available online and a user can retrieve it irrespective of the computer they use. The blogs can also submit their posts to these sites so that the visitors of a bookmarking sites can view blog posts that are related to their interests.
7. Social Softwares which are nothing but again websites that allow users who are logged into their website to interact with one another by using instant messages that were previously done using instant messaging softwares outside web browser. The users could maintain their profiles that can be viewed by others. This can be misused by users with malicious intent.

I hope that now you will be clearer about web2. In short web2 pages are enhanced web pages that allows users to interact with it or the users of it.

Now you may have an another question about what will the Web 3.0 about which I will publish a post at a later date.

If you find this page useful then feel free to Del.icio this, Digg this, or use more options given below to share this page.