Web 2.0

Today we are going to look at web 2.0. It is something that a human being came up with as technology was driving up the development level.
It can more or less be defined as collective intelligence. My understanding of collective intelligence is that it involves a combination of programs so as to derive a finished product of that which you see today on a website for example.

Web 2.0 is about feedback, people communicating to and from people and a way in which there is a link between the technology and the people that use it. it involves the focus of simplicity, joy of use, AJAX, the long tail, affiliation, css-design, etc.

Before we had Google and Amazon then it advanced Wikipedia, eBay and now there are new platforms like Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
(look up network effects on Wikipedia, aka Metcalfe’s law)
The more people that are connected the more effective and useful Metcalfe’s law is.

Page Rank
This is something that Google adopted when it was started in 1996 by pHd students in Stanford that wanted to make a sort of online dictionary. It works in a way that a person types in what they are looking for in the home page, and then it opens ups to a variety of links that may have an answer of a sort to that which is being looked for, and those links are also providing more links to related soruces, and it goes on like that. This is a way in which page rank can be understood simplest and one of the best examples is Google.
Long tail
This is something that has been adopted by Amazon. It tends to sell its books that maybe related to that which might have been there in the past or that is there presently. And this in a way manages to increase their market. For example, there was a book called “Touching the Void” that was being sold in Touching the Void” and it sold more than twice its original time because it was done on the assumption that the people that the market would be the same.
Thus the Amazon tends to sell more books in the long tail than in the head.

About some of the websites, like youtube provide video content of which this becomes competitive to the tv stations, facebook-over 20% of internet usage presently is using it and it has over 400 million people with it, twitter is a good example of present day collective intelligence. In that things happen on twitter much faster than it actually happens or even gets to be known.ie; an earthquake was gotten to be heard about in America before it actually happened.

AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML) is one of the things that are used as leverage for the collective intelligence. In that it is more or less a combination of hyper text markup language (html), cascading style sheet (css), extensible markup language (xml), javascript.

AJAX is not technology, it more or less several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful ways to create its final product.
Have a look at http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/essays/archives/00385.php .

Network effect- the more people that use the stuff, the more useful it gets.
Open data
Participation- providing a service, not a product encourages user contribution.
Rich user experience- easy to use
Re-mixability