A summary of Web 2.0 , the new Internet standard

What is the development of the Internet, it's really a virtual space that keeps on expanding. According to a Netcraft's survey there are more than 100 millions of websites out there and still on counting.... Well, if you are hooked up and keep yourself following up with some tech news, there have been a lots of talks about web 2.0 , i.e the current hot issue, so-called a standard of the web.

When the time Yahoo and Lycos were in dominance of the web, it was the era of web 1.0. But now, it belongs to web 2.0, with the dominance of Google, and other newly upcoming web 2.0 websites, such as Flickr, YouTube, Multiply etc (Although some of these have been acquired by Yahoo! or Google or MSN etc).

Web 2.0, put it in short is the web standard having more emphasize on the users or the benefits to the users. Users will get thier own spaces, greater usability and sharing features on the web! The spaces here refer to blogging space, tagging (another way of bookmarking, categorizing web content in your own way), general storage spaces for videos, audios, documents (word processor doc, spreadsheet etc.).

Here is a summary of spaces,sharing features and greater web usability that you can have over the Internet !

Blog
The famous term that comes from "web log", which you can write your journal or diary on a web space, such as this blog. There are lots of free service providers out there, such as this blog, live space on MSN, besides you can easily get the famous ones such as this BlogSpot space by Google or LiveJournal.

The above are service providers that allow you to have your "nick" as a sub-domain under thier domain, e.g ketyung.spaces.live.com . Other than that you wanna pay a little bit of money or if you are a techchies, and you know setting up of a web space, which you can get WordPress, which is free and host your own blog with your own preferred domain name.
Video/Audio/Picture spaces The web even now is getting into "multimedia-loaded", i.e full of pictures, audio and videos. Even for users now you can quite a hand-full of service providers out there for you to create your multimedia contents such as YouTube, Multiply, Vox

General documents spaces Here are the spaces where you can create,store and share your general documents such as word, spreadsheet. The companies that are on the race for providing such a kind of services are Writely (which is now Google docs/spreadsheet), Zoho (ZohoWriter, ZohoSheet & ZohoShow for word processor, spreadsheet and presentation such as powerpoint), BoxNet (Online file storage for all sorts of files such as documents & multimedia contents) and others such as EditGrid, IRows are in the spreadsheet categories

Tagging
What about tagging? Tagging is by means of adding any website URL to a common space by associating the URL with tags that you like! It's like a common bookmark space, which you can add your own "word" for the tag or category and you can also share it to your friends and family. Most web portal nowadays come with tagging feature, which you will see a big tag cloud, that comes with words in different font sizes, more popular tags having bigger font size! The most popular common tagging space is del.icio.us, a very special domain name with the word delicious, basically it's a .US domain name. Some other portals such as blogger's search and ping services like Technorati, classifieds spaces also provide tag clouds!

Greater Usability
Other than spaces & sharing features, web 2.0 also puts emphasize on better usability of web interface i.e enhancing usability and friendliness, this is where AJAX web comes in, the hot term for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML among the web developers/programmers.

What about this term "AJAX", what can it do ? It's a programming term, the final effect to the web, it brings greater usability of a website. In short, AJAX is the technique adopted for building websites that minimize "post back".

If you have been a web surfer for quite some time, you would have noticed that navigating thru a website require many mouse clicks and the web pages will need to be sent to and fro the web server. Especially when filling up a form when signing up for an account on a web portal, once you have fully entered all your particulars and ready to submit it, after the submission, the page will come back giving you some errors, possibly claiming that a duplicated username or email, you will need then to change the email/username and submit again. What would happen if there is another error, e.g you forgot keying in your password? There would be another post-back! This normally gives some frustration to the users, which they will claim the Internet is so slow! As the web pages will need to travel to fro back to the web server which is far away, e.g you are accessing a website in US!

The use of AJAX in developing web will minimize "post back". In short AJAX is a web technique by means of using JavaScript and XML, which verification such as above-mentioned process can be done without "post back", i.e the user will be prompted on the spot once there is a duplication of email or username before they submit the form (The mechanism behind is the web page uses AJAX to send back data to the web server "quietly" for verification and prompt the user if there is a duplication). Besides , AJAX is great , of course with some combination of programming technique such as DHTML (Dynamic HTML). The above-mentioned spreadsheet or docs creator, such as Zoho, EditGrid are done using AJAX+DHTML or flash for better usability, which will be as good as your normal Windows desktop apps! A similar post is here