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Tags: web2.0, research, Article, resources, reference on 2008-06-25 and saved by19 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Some of the important site features that mark out a Web2 site include the following:
- Users as first class entities in the system, with prominent profile pages, including such features as: age, sex, location, testimonials, or comments about the user by other users.
- The ability to form connections between users, via links to other users who are “friends,” membership in “groups” of various kinds, and subscriptions or RSS feeds of “updates” from other users.
- The ability to post content in many forms: photos, videos, blogs, comments and ratings on other users’ content, tagging of own or others’ content, and some ability to control privacy and sharing.
- Other more technical features, including a public API to allow third–party enhancements and “mash–ups,” and embedding of various rich content types (e.g., Flash videos), and communication with other users through internal e–mail or IM systems.
Web sites which incorporate a strong social component, involving user profiles, friend links; Web sites which encourage user–generated content in the form
of text, video, and photo postings along with comments, tags, and ratings; or just Web sites that have gained popularity in recent years and are subject to fevered speculations about valuations and IPO prospects. Nevertheless, these various categories have significant intersections, and so it is meaningful to talk broadly about the class of Web 2.0 sites without excessive ambiguity about
which definition is being used (from now on, we use Web2 and Web1 respectively for brevity).
However, the essential difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is that content creators were few in Web 1.0 with the vast majority of users simply acting as consumers of content, while any participant can be a content creator in Web 2.0 and numerous technological aids have been created to maximize the potential for content creation. The democratic nature of Web 2.0 is exemplified by creations of large number of niche groups (collections of friends) who can exchange content of any kind (text, audio, video) and tag, comment, and link to both intra–group and extra–group “pages.” A popular innovation in Web 2.0 is “mashups,” which combine or render content in novel forms. For example, street addresses present in a classified advertisement database are linked with a map Web site to visualize the locations. Such cross–site linkage captures the generic concept of creating additional links between records of any semi–structured database with another database.
At the outset we need to distinguish between the concepts of Web 2.0 and social networks. Web 2.0 is both a platform on which innovative technologies have been built and a space where users are treated as first class objects.