The State of Web 2.0, The Future of Web Software

SphereOfInfluence writes "Despite some disdain for the term Web 2.0, the underlying ideas seem to be genuinely taking off from the seed of successful techniques of the first generation of the Web. Here's an in-depth review of the future of Web 2.0 and online software from Web 2.0 proponent, Dion Hinchcliffe. Like or hate the term, the actual ideas in Web 2.0 are turning out to not only usable but a growing cadre of companies are actively being successful with them. This includes the Ajax phenomenon being actively pursued by Microsoft and Google, widespread social software, and massive online communities like MySpace. These trends are all leading to predictions on the ultimate fallout of these changes, something increasingly called social computing. "

Comments

Re:Why is it called web "2.0"

[slavemowgli]

Pretty much, yes - Javascript, CSS and XML. The funny thing about this is that this is pretty close to what Tim (Berners-Lee, that is) had in mind right from the beginning - that users would actually be able to collaborate on things using the web rather than just getting a bunch of static [1] pages thrown at them.

1. "static" in the sense of not dynamically interacting with the user in an ongoing communication with the server, that is, not in the sense of "not dynamically generated by the server". Note that a page using "regular" Javascript is still a static page; there might be user interaction, but it's not usually going to communicate with the server, so all interaction is local only (akin to writing into a book you bought, for example).