Web 2.what?

What exactly is web 2.0

Web 2.0 is a difficult concept to define.  It’s interactive with the sense you can Skype with people and play games against other people, it can be used anywhere due to the fact many schools, libraries, and restaurants to name a few have WIFI, and it allows for two-way communication through email, blogs, chats, or other means such as Facebook.  Many websites back in the day were very bland and didn’t have that much going for them but now because they have evolved in to being more interactive people can give their feedback whether it’s about a product or about a sports team and people can send messages on forums or through video.

Web 2.0 is very engaging and involved in the center of everyone lives. It stores important information and is being used more and more in schools where many classrooms have set up video classes with other students or at work for presentations.

Many people wonder if Web 2.0 is living up to the hype.  Indeed it is due to the endless possibilities on how far you can go. Through the web you can literally travel and conference anywhere and everywhere across the world. It’s almost like you can be two places at once through the safety of your own home. The contacts you can have are endless and the extreme potential one person can have is increasing significantly.  We hold so much power in our fingertips, the possibility to do anything is so near yet so far. The only downfall to the huge hype of web 2.0 is people are forgetting about the “real world”. People are becoming too consumed with being online, forgetting what real life interaction is, or what it is like to just go outside and have good people skills. But that is only a slight set back to all the good things we have accomplished and to what the future holds for the internet.

What Web 2.0 has to offer.

Web 2.0 has some of the most amazing features and technologies and easily trumps over anything else that even tries to compare. Some of the technologies that it has to offer are and include interoperability, user-centered design, interactive information sharing, and crowdsourcing.

Interoperability is the ability of diverse systems and organizations to work together. The term is often used in a technical systems engineering sense, or alternatively in a broad sense, taking into account social, political, and organizational factors that impact system to system performance. While using XML or RSS, all websites are accessible from PCs, Macs, phones, and iPads instead of just using one source.

interactive information sharing is any kind of sharing done through social media websites. Anyone who uses Facebook, Myspace, or Youtube who  share information in the form of photos, music, photos or anything digitally. You also have the choice to either have any of this information published for the world or to keep is private for only your friends and family. This form of sharing falls in four main design patterns: one-to-one sharing, one-to-many sharing, many-to-many-sharing and many-to-one sharing.

User-centered designs are a process in which the needs, wants, and limitations of any users of a product are given close attention at each stage of the design process. This is a multi-stage process because every interface needs to be tested. This is used at a service to the user where a program or software doesn’t have to be installed. An example would be Google.

Crowdsourcing is the process in which involves the outsourcing if tasks to different groups of people. This particular process can happen both online and offline. Crowdsourcing takes a task or problem and outsources it to a specific person also the idea behind this was the data would improve in time when more people use it and add more on to it. An example of this would be Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is a free, collaboratively edited, and multilingual Internet encyclopedia, all of the articles are collaboratively written by many volunteers around the world. As of recent there are 285 different language editions on Wikipedia and a total of 23 million articles, 4 million of which are in the English language. Almost all of these articles can be edited by anyone who has access to the site.

"The Web we know now, which loads into a browser window in essentially static screenfuls, is only an embryo of the Web to come. The first glimmerings of Web 2.0 are beginning to appear, and we are just starting to see how that embryo might develop. The Web will be understood not as screenfuls of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens. It will [...] appear on your computer screen, [...] on your TV set [...] your car dashboard [...] your cell phone [...] hand-held game machines [...] maybe even your microwave oven." -Darcy Dinucci

What we are doing with Web 2.0 is increasing our possibilites to explore the world through our computers and the freedom to contribute to this world as much as we want. We are contributing and participating in an amazing experience that is still growing and blossoming. The future holds such a greater involvement with Web 2.0. It is only going to evolve into something bigger than it already is.