Web 2.0 - The Next Generation

Web 2.0 refers to the second generation of the World Wide Web, which has objectives in further development of communication, secure and dependable information sharing, and also collaboration on the World Wide Web. Web 2.0 has made evolutionary changes to web-based communities, hosted services, and applications such as social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs and folksonomies.

This term was first coined together after the O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. Although the term suggests a contemporary World Wide Web, it does not comment on updates to any technical specifications but makes reference to the changes of how software developers and end-users operate the web.

Rather then being built on one technology, Web 2.0 is built on several. An example is Ajax; this is used to create innovative interactive web or rich internet applications. Ajax is a web development technology that is based on JavaScript and XML. With this technology, users are able to use the World Wide Web more like an interactive desktop application instead of a read only website (Web 1.0).