the Web 2.0
Everybody in the cyberspace is talking about web 2.0 and about web applications based on it. It is important we can have in mind that web 2.0 is the new beginning in the new era of the Internet. Web 1.0 and web 2.0 is something like the transition from 20th to 21st century. This transition was important because people began to smarter applications and developers have been focusing in develop dynamics and interactive web applications.
Web 2.0 is a concept that began as an intelligent initiative from O’Reilly and MediaLive International (Web 2.0 Conference in 2004) in a discussion session where a lot of ideas were revealed. Those ideas were pretty beneficial to determine the near future of the Internet. Today, the famous web 2.0 (with almost 10 million citations in Google) has generated many disagreements and contradictions. I personally agree with many concepts and ideas behind the web 2.0. What we really know is that it is a concept describing the tendencies of the use of the “World Wide Web” created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989.
There are people thinking that it is a new version of the internet or an update of the World Wide Web. But I don’t think it refers to an update of any technical specification. One of the best descriptions of the web 2.0 was born in the declaration of this conference: “Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform”.
We can see that a keyword here is “platform”. The web 2.0 has become the Internet not only as globally network but as online platform where you can run all your applications without needing do it from your personal computer. Also “interactivity” and “interconnectivity” are relevant terms embraced in the web 2.0.
However, we can’t talk about web 2.0 without mention web 1.0 as a past reference and the web 3.0 as the prominent future of the internet basically based on a semantic web as was proposed by Sir Berners-Lee. For instance, those groups discussing about this important topic are able to differentiate the past era of internet from the current one. The figure 1.1 describes the conclusions obtained by the brainstorming made by O’Reilly, MediaLive International and others.
One of the most useful and revolutionary examples I use in my daily tasks is Google Docs, where I can make a lot of things without opening any application installed in my desktop. I use normally my e-mail account, copy and paste some information in Google Docs, and then I can export documents to PDF files or share it with other Google’s users. Web 2.0 brings you a very high performance and flexibility.
