By: Abraham Reyes

Brief Summary

Web 2.0 is the new era of the technological progress that occurs within the Internet phenomenon. It is the evolution in use of software and interactivity that exists between the end-user and the World Wide Web. The interactive web is possible because of software/web applications developers which principally make the tools available for the public. Certain companies such as Google have such functionalities on the web that are available and ready for the personal use of entire global communities. 

The term appeared in 2001 after the scare that technology; computers principally would “crash” upon arrival of the new Millennium. After this event the web actually became more important than ever .The term-which Tim O’Reilly created during a session with MediaLive international-gained popularity as it was viewed differently due to great new software and applications. It is because of the complexity of the topic that I will not attempt to discuss in great detail all of the aspects and key terms within; instead I will make it concise.

There have been disputes from the public and among organizations as to what this topic really is, part of that is because it was noted that some of the web applications in the Web 2.0 already existed in the early days of the World Wide Web.

The ideal behind the Web 2.0 Programming is that it is beneficial to users and a success to providers. Several things such as social networking, communications, information sharing and collaboration-among many other- are what make the Web 2.0 era.

There are various web sites that use Web 2.0 some are more popular than others and others are expected to surpass current sites that perhaps don’t use Web 2.0. Part of this discussion is that one of the Web 2.0 principles is that its features should come free to the user. This is when competition gets rigid and the free service providers prosper in a world that could be called a democratic web service. In other words people enjoy free stuff. Sites that are free soon become the center of attention due to unlimited uses. There are many popular sites that are Web 2.0 based; such are Amazon.com, Digg, Itunes, Google Maps, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and best for last Wikipedia. These are some of the most popular sites for networking whether is connecting with people, educational purpose, entertainment, shopping, obtaining information, information sharing etc.

Wikipedia

I choose this one principally for the reason of being “wiki.” This site is a great example of Web 2.0 technology. Wiki basically means, and I quote from Wikipedia “A wiki is a collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone with access to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language.” Like this site there are many others-which I have mentioned above- that are extremely popular in the entire world because anyone can utilize them at no charge and great things can be accomplished through them.

Lastly I want to touch a bit on Amazon.com. This is one of the biggest web retail companies that was actually ranked 7th most visited site in the US by comScore. Amazon being a Web 2.0 company has its web services (AWS) that seem to be bigger that Amazon itself. In other words, a new application such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) continue to grow. This is measured in bandwidth usage for companies that use Amazon’s applications and that are very likely to prosper. Amazon’s Web Services allows for companies to use its web platform to create applications that can be used to build web sites. Anyone can build a website using these types of applications; there is no need for server. Facebook for example agreed to join with Amazon to allow developers to create applications for users.
These are some of the types of web services that exists in the ever growing world of technology and in the realm of the Web 2.0