We all know the Web 1.0 and have used it for much of our work and pleasure with ease. The modern day web is now the Web 2.0. This is not to replace the World Wide Web but instead it is to enhance it and make it even better for the users. Social Media is now top of the line giving the users a much better form of communication. Google who started out just like an encyclopedia is now much more advanced making it better for the user. We all like to have Google in our browser so that we can find information quickly.
Web 2.0 vs Web 1.0
Under the hood Web 1.0 logic was at the application server. With web 2.0 the application logic is spread across the client (browser) and server.
There are other things that the Web 2.0 provides for us that makes it even more technically advanced but using the Web 2.0 is very easy to do, allows the readers to actually interact with the Web pages more like you would with an application on your desktop, it also allows the readers to contribute to web in an easy way.
The first Web 2.0 conference was done in 2004 with O’Reilly Media and this made the popularity of Web 2.0 rise to the top. Everyone wanted to be able to conference or interact with one another. Netscape framed “the web as platform” with their flagship product the web browser. Now we use our web browsers without thought to the fact that it was just created in the recent years.
The software programs created to make Web 2.0 more users friendly is what has brought this new concept to light for the users. The Web 2.0 was not made to take the place of Web 1.0 but instead just enhance our user capability. IT Technicians all know that soon the desktop will be considered more like the “WebTop”. The Software programs are usually built upon the Web instead of the desktop now with the new Web 2.0 software programs have changed all that.
Web 2.0 does more for the end user by not only allowing them to retrieve information but they increase their abilities to interface. The user is now capable of providing data on the web page and controlling the data. Now the user is able to participate as well as gain information. This is a major step forward to future of the use of the World Wide Web. Some of the characteristics of Web 2.0 are a more openness, freedom and collective intelligence when there user participation is applied. This is viewed as important attributes for Web 2.0 end users.
Web 2.0 applications provide a rich user experience, but the parts you can’t see are just as important-and impressive. They use powerful techniques to process information intelligently and offer features based on patterns and relationships in data. Algorithms of the Intelligent Web show readers how to use the same techniques employed by household names like Google Ad Sense, Netflix, and Amazon to transform raw data into actionable information.
Web 2.0 has allowed developers creating applications that collect, analyze, and act on the massive quantities of data users leave in their wake as they use the web. Readers learn to build Netflix-style recommendation engines, and how to apply the same techniques to social-networking sites. See how click-trace analysis can result in smarter ad rotations.
With new techniques of Algorithms, developers are able to create recommendation systems, search and ranking, automatic grouping of similar objects, classification of objects, forecasting models, and autonomous agents. They also become familiar with a large number of open-source libraries and SDKs, and freely available APIs from the hottest sites on the internet, such as Facebook, Google, eBay, and Yahoo.
But there are challenges when developing applications based on web 2.0:
Due to over usage of web 2.0 capabilities’, no doubt web page becomes nicer and interactive but performance hits. Sites are overloaded with Advertisement plug-in, javascript libraries, css and images, and this leads to:
- Lost revenue and reputation
- Errors, Performance degradation, compatibility issues
- Loss of customers: our client’s competitors are just click away
- Site Abandonment: poor performance increases site abandonment risk
- Slow performance may impact brand
- People remember their experience when a site is slow, can make users reluctant to the site
It becomes necessary for developers and designers to test sites developed with web 2.0 technology. Developers should validate:
- How long it takes to download html, via network and in the browser itself.
- Browser compatibility with JS library’s being used.
- Optimizing Ajax, JS, images, CSS.
- Updating Old JS library with new ones for new browsers.
- Not placing too many ads
- Caching at CDN’s
Websites can be tested at http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/ and http://www.webpagetest.org/.
Other resources for web 2.0 development are:
http://ajaxian.com/
http://developer.yahoo.com/
http://code.google.com/
