What Is Web 2.0?

Date First Published: 8th October 2022

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: Web Services

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 5/10

Learn more about what Web 2.0 is in this article.

Web 2.0 is the second stage of development on the World Wide Web that refers to websites that contain user-generated content, such as reviews, forums, comments, and uploaded content. Web 2.0 technologies make websites much more interactive and dynamic. The introduction of user-generated content enables visitors to contribute with their own knowledge and thoughts as well as build online communities instead of just visiting a website to read content posted by the website owner. Social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter and wikis, such as Wikipedia are examples of Web 2.0. Since most Web 2.0 services are offered free of charge, they have grown at a very fast rate. With Web 2.0, information is no longer accessed in a passive way and it evolved from Web 1.0, the original version of the World Wide Web that contained static content that only changed when the webmaster manually updated it.

Other features of Web 2.0 include software as a service (SaaS), which are sites that use built-in APIs to connect with external apps, data sources, and websites behind the scenes and network as a platform, which allows people to use applications on the World Wide Web without having to install software on their computer and take up storage space.

Note:

Although this term mimics the numbering of software versions, Web 2.0 does not refer to a specific version of the World Wide Web. It refers to a range of technological improvements and changes that happened to enable interactive websites with user-generated content.

Technologies Used In Web 2.0

The technologies used in Web 2.0 include:

• AJAX - Uses JavaScript programming and the DOM to update certain areas of a webpage without having to reload it. Communications, such as data requests going to the server are separated from data coming back to the page, in order to allow users to continue interacting with the page. This is known as asynchronous communication. The data fetched from an AJAX request is formatted in XML or JSON.
• PHP - A widely used server-side scripting language that is embedded in HTML pages and used in web development. PHP is often used to create dynamic content, interact with databases, and perform calculations.
• Perl - A high-level dynamic programming language used to create scripts to generate dynamic content on a website.
• Python - A high-level programming language that can be used on both the frontend and backend.
• Ruby - An open-source programming language used to build desktop applications, data processing services, and automation tools. It can be used in web development.

Issues With Web 2.0

Whilst Web 2.0 makes websites more interactive and allows anyone to make a contribution and gives an opportunity for collaboration, Web 2.0 sites can be vulnerable to spam, misleading information, trolling, cyberbullying, and have privacy issues as user-generated content makes it easy for users to accidentally share confidential information to the public. This is the reason why Web 2.0 sites need to be regularly moderated.

Obviously, for large sites, such as YouTube, it is impossible for one person to monitor every piece of content that goes on there and the only way they would know that there is content that is against the rules of the site is if someone reported it. In addition, if lots of information is posted every day by different people with different opinions, readers can get confused and overwhelmed with that information.

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