Out of all the Internet buzzwords and jargon that have made the transition to the public consciousness, “Web 2.0″ might be the best known. Even though a lot of people have heard about it, not many have any idea what Web 2.0 means. Some people claim that the term itself is nothing more than a marketing strategy designed to convince venture capitalists to invest millions of dollars into Web sites. It’s true that when Dale Dougherty of O’Reilly Media came up with the term, there was no clear definition. There wasn’t even any agreement about if there was a Web 1.0.
In brief, the characteristics of Web 2.0 include:
* The ability for visitors to make changes to Web pages: Amazon allows visitors to post product reviews. Using an online form, a visitor can add information to Amazon’s pages that future visitors will be able to read.
* Using Web pages to link people to other users: Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are popular in part because they make it easy for users to find each other and keep in touch.
* Fast and efficient ways to share content: YouTube is the perfect example. A YouTube member can create a video and upload it to the site for others to watch in less than an hour.
* New ways to get information: Today, Internet surfers can subscribe to a Web page’s Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds and receive notifications of that Web page’s updates as long as they maintain an Internet connection.
* Expanding access to the Internet beyond the computer: Many people access the Internet through devices like cell phones or video game consoles; before long, some experts expect that consumers will access the Internet through television sets and other devices.
Think of Web 1.0 as a library. You can use it as a source of information, but you can’t contribute to or change the information in any way. Web 2.0 is more like a big group of friends and acquaintances. You can still use it to receive information, but you also contribute to the conversation and make it a richer experience.
The two other Internet buzzwords and jargon that have made the transition to the public consciousness are widgets and mashups.
What is Widgets?
Widgets are small applications that people can insert into Web pages by copying and embedding lines of code into a Web page’s code. They can be games, news feeds, video players or just about anything else.
According to wikipedia, A web widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation. They are derived from the idea of code reuse. Other terms used to describe web widgets include: gadget, badge, module, capsule, snippet, mini and flake. Web widgets often but not always use DHTML, JavaScript, or Adobe Flash.
Applications can be integrated within a third party website by the placement of a small snippet of code. The code brings in ‘live’ content – advertisements, links, images – from a third party site without the web site owner having to update. End users can utilize Web Widgets to enhance a number of web-based hosts, or drop targets. Categories of drop targets include social networks, blogs, wikis and personal homepages. Although end users primarily use Web Widgets to enhance their personal web experiences, or the web experiences of visitors to their personal sites, corporations can potentially use Web Widgets to improve their web sites using syndicated content and functionality from third party providers.
The use of web widgets has been increasingly proposed as a marketing channel that could replace the less effective targeted banner ads and take advantage of the viral distribution in social networks.
What is Mashups?
Mashup originally referred to the practice in pop music (notably hip-hop) of producing a new song by mixing two or more existing pieces.
In web technology, A mashup is the combination of two or more applications into a single application. For example, a developer might combine a program that lets users review restaurants with Google Maps. The new mashup application could show not only restaurant reviews, but also map them out so that the user could see the restaurants’ locations.
The architecture of Mashup web applications is always composed of three parts:
- The content provider: it is the source of the data. Data is made available using an API and different Web-protocols such as RSS, REST, and Web Service
- The Mashup site: is the web application which provides the new service using different data sources that are not owned by it.
- The client web browser: is the user interface of the Mashup. In a web-application, the content can be mashed by the client web browsers using client side web language for example JavaScript.
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