João Moreno .com

Web 2.0 has come to such a state that we can all agree we can’t live without it. AJAX, folksonomy, fancy graphics and collaborative and user-oriented content are some of the facelifts the Internet was in serious need, a couple of years ago. Especially the fancy graphics. Note that the term Web 2.0 was born in 2004.

All hail the mighty XMLHttpRequest

Technologies that provided us Web 2.0 have been around for far before 2004. That is, more importantly, Javascript, XML and HTML. One could easily open up some HTML through HTTP and see the webpage they wanted. If you wanted more content, especially server-side content, you’d have to load up another page. One-paged dynamic content was trapped in client-sided technologies like Javascript and – for who-knows’ sake – Flash.

Then along came XMLHttpRequest, right out of Microsoft’s Outlook Web Access 2000 and bam! One could use Javascript to send XML packets over to the server, and what do you know… the server replied and one could place that same answer on the browser window without leaving the initial page.

What does this all mean?

Well, most of it is really interesting stuff - it means that all geeks in the world had another cool toy to play with. But the consequences are what really matter. And what came out of those consequences too. A more user-oriented kind of websites began to appear. Tagging data. Creating statistics. Relating users with one another according to their choices. Syndication. All in a very, very social and simple way.

Who’s using it?

Say Gmail. First opened to the public in April, 2004 and rapidly became one of the most used web-based e-mail clients. Not only for its 1 Gigabyte initial disk-space offer (now over 2.8 Gigabyte) but also for the neat AJAX interface, which provided an extremely functional web-based user interface. Later they introduced fancy features like browser-integrated GTalk (Google’s messaging client), RSS newsreader and labels. Labels are tags, singles keywords used to classify everything. This is an example of folksonomy, and brings us to the next example service.

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service. Extremely fashion these days, and very Web 2.0 with an extreme use of folksonomy. Over there you can bookmark all your favorite web-sites and use that to interact with the rest of the network. Bookmarks are tagged, given a name and description and then submitted. Many simple but relevant statistical data can be computed like the tag cloud, or recommendations according to your own bookmarks. The most bookmarked links are displayed in a hot list on del.icio.us’ homepage.

And me! I just added a coulpe of plugins to Wordpress, and made my blog a bit more accessible and advertisable with links to Digg and del.icio.us. And I also added some good looking icons to the sidebar to various Web 2.0 related services. Note that my blog itself isn’t using any new fancy technology (well, maybe except pingbacks and tackbacks that are implemented in Wordpress) but it’s extremely more user-oriented in the sense that facilitates integration with famous social sites, which could increase its audience. Maybe, we’ll see.

Why does it matter?

Users are the core of any community, and also user-oriented communities survive allot longer than the rest. On the Internet, we provide such features by giving the users what they want, provided by themselves (like del.icio.us) and with the best interface possible (like Gmail). Content is important, but content provided by users is what the users need. Good interfaces are important, but time/bandwidth saving interfaces are better. The fancy graphics are just for aesthetics’ sake – and what a good motive!

Web 2.0 is spreading like hell, and these examples are not at all representative of all the features this revolution has brought. Here are some popular links of sites using several new technologies connected to the revolution:

• Digg
• Youtube
• StumbleUpon
• MySpace
• LinkedIn
• Twitter

Links

What Is Web 2.0

Wikipedia: Web 2.0