February 4, 2006

One of the most common uses of the internet is surfing. This is plain from the fact that there are some 8.4 million unique websites and the number is growing. Traditionally, the web has been a static read-only medium, displaying information about technological changes, social and political developments, and other professional issues.

This paradigm of usage is about to change with the introduction of Web 2.0 — a concept that proponents claim will radically change how we interact with websites as well as businesses and the social model surrounding the web. At the same time, there are critics who claim that there is no such thing as Web 2.0, arguing that the term is just a marketing gimmick to mint money.

The term “Web 2.0” was coined by O’Reilly (the famous publishers of computer books) and MediaLive International (a company specializing in organizing events) at a brainstorming session, where they were searching for a catching phrase for a new series of conferences. This has been much debated and has added to the controversy over what exactly is meant by the term, given that it was coined for marketing purposes.

O’Reilly defines the vague term in one of the most acceptable ways: “You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from the core.”

Fundamentally, it means treating web as a platform which provides services and which gets better as the time goes by and more users use it. Compare this with what is called Web 1.0 which comprises permanent pages, getting better with content management systems, sometimes called “Web 1.5”.

But Web 2.0 strives to bring real applications to the web, turning it into a computing platform. Just as the OS manufacturers cannot predict what their users are doing at their workstations, web applications will be used by end-users where every user will have a different experience. Thus, there will be no ‘page’ per se which everybody may look at.

Another principle involves democracy. Web 2.0 empowers millions of web users to contribute in creating something that matches or exceeds the quality of a professional work.

Voluntarily edited Wikipedia is an example, which has surpassed Encyclopaedia Britannica in terms of the number of articles and which can be used free of cost. This means an end to editorial control over the content, the same way blogs have replaced personal websites.

Losing control also introduces the notions of sharing and reuse — think about the Napster and Bittorrent boom as against the static sites offering music downloads.

Democratic usage not only enables users to participate and reap benefits of each others’ efforts but also lets the web evolve continuously. This evolution does not necessarily require adding more hardware at the provider-end, but harnessing what is called the “network-effect”.

For instance, in a Bittorent P2P file sharing network, every client becomes a server as well, hosting file fragments, and thus increasing the overall server size as more users are added.

Since it is number of users that add value to the service, competitor startups are very difficult to manage in this model. eBay proves a similar point — size of the business grows as the number of both sellers and buyers increase and the company only provides a link between the two. Being a seller, if you know there are lots of buyers at a particular site, you will probably opt for that site to list your product.

As more sellers and buyers come in, the link between the two becomes more profitable. This represents a shift from the business model of the dot-com heyday, which was built around selling propriety products.

Survivors of the dot-com crash learned the lesson and developed technologies to take into account user activity. Amazon, for example, depends on user reviews, ratings and trends to suggest books in response to searches.

Web 2.0 backers claim that surfers should be playing the central decision-making role, which would affect other surfers. This is exactly how spam filtering has begun to work — instead of message analysis, just ask the email subscribers to mark message as spam.

A similar service is offered by Del.icio.us, whose creators describe it as social bookmarking that allows tagging through descriptive tokens. This user-centric approach has played a pivotal role in the development of the open source movement as well.

Who could have predicted that Linux would rise — when Microsoft cashed on its Windows OS platform — to thrash the likes of Lotus and Word Perfect office applications and Netscape browser, by introducing its own integrated products?

But this very platform is under threat by Web 2.0, which pundits predict will eventually make terms like “packaged software” and “release management” things of the past. And this new platform will be driven by the community of users.

Google is believed to have played a leading role in the development of Web 2.0 by introducing innovative services and taking over start-up companies to keep its dominance over its breadth of offerings.

This brings us to another important principle of Web 2.0. Do not maltreat your users. If you have used a web-based office application (again an example of Web 2.0), you will see that it is only a user name of choice which you need to give before you start working. No forms to fill, no confirmation emails to reply to and no activation links to click on.

Technologies

So far, we have understood that Web 2.0 is not something concrete like a standard upgrade to earlier software or list of standards. It is more of an improvement movement of the web, with a set of components and features providing new and better user experience.

This means that there are, and have been, several online applications and sites providing these features but not necessarily calling themselves Web 2.0 compliant. These features are based on technologies such as CSS, XML, XHTML, XUL, SVG, Java Web Start, free/open web-service APIs, WSDL (Web Services Description Language), unobtrusive application techniques, use of communication protocols REST and SOAP, http streaming, and other related technologies.

These techniques make it possible to offer rich weblog posting, social networking, functionality extension, de-centralization of data, collaborative editing, virtual communities, podcasting, real-time monitoring, flash mobs and citizen journalism — all pointing towards a transition to Web 2.0. For such functionalities to work and deliver, data management and automating the task of learning from users is of great importance.

It is expected that there is going to be a fierce competition to own certain types of core data, like maps, images, locations, identities and events, so that new applications could be built upon them. These applications will be updated more frequently, perhaps on a daily basis as compared to yearly versions of traditional software which users have to manually upgrade.

These rapidly enhancing applications will allow other services to emerge, which the source services never imagined or intended. For example, HousingMaps that simply uses map and location information from other providers to create a new solution. Efforts are also underway to put server side software enabling Web 2.0 on mobile devices such as laptops, handhelds and flash drives.

Those who criticize the usage of the term Web 2.0 claim that there is nothing tangible about this new wave of development. However, it does not matter whether the term gets widespread acceptance or not. The concepts associated with Web 2.0 are going to empower the common surfer like never before.

The writer nizar.ali@gmail.com is a regular contributor