”The Web of documents has morphed into a Web of data. We are no longer just looking to the same old sources for information. Now we’re looking to a new set of tools to aggregate and remix micro content in new and useful ways.”
In Web 1.0, a small number of writers created Web pages for a large number of readers. As a result, people could get information by going directly to the source: Adobe.com for graphic design issues, Microsoft.com for Windows issues, and CNN.com for news. Over time, however, more and more people started writing content in addition to reading it. This had an interesting effect—suddenly there was too much information to keep up with! We did not have enough time for everyone who wanted our attention and visiting all sites with relevant content simply wasn’t possible. As personal publishing caught on and went mainstream, it became apparent that the Web 1.0 paradigm had to change.
Enter Web 2.0, a vision of the Web in which information is broken up into “microcontent” units that can be distributed over dozens of domains. The Web of documents has morphed into a Web of data. We are no longer just looking to the same old sources for information. Now we’re looking to a new set of tools to aggregate and remix microcontent in new and useful ways.
These tools, the interfaces of Web 2.0, will become the frontier of design innovation.
The evidence is already here with RSS aggregators, search engines, portals, APIs (application programming interfaces, which provide hooks to data) and Web services (where data can be accessed via XML-RPC, SOAP and other technologies). Google Maps (in beta) provides the same functionality as similar competing services but features a far superior interface. Flickr’s interface is one of the most intuitive and beloved around. Del.icio.us offers personal and social functionality, and reaches far beyond its own site. Interfaces like these are changing the way we store, access, and share information. It matters very little what domain content comes from.
Web 2.0 has often been described as “the Web as platform,” and if we think about the Web as a platform for interacting with content, we begin to see how it impacts design. Imagine a bunch of stores of content provided by different parties—companies, individuals, governments—upon which we could build interfaces that combine the information in ways no single domain ever could. For example, Amazon.com makes its database of content accessible to the outside world. Anyone can design an interface to replace Amazon’s that better suits specific needs (see Amazon Light). The power of this is that content can be personalized or remixed with other data to create much more useful tools.
The main services\application of web 2.0 ….. is
Blogs
Wikis
Tagging & Social bookmarking
Multimedia sharing
Audio blogging and Podcasting
RSS and syndication
As we have seen, there are a number of technology services that are often posited as representing the
Web 2.0 concept in some way. In recent months, however, there has been an explosion of new ideas,
applications and start-up companies working on ways to extend existing services. Some of these are
likely to become more important than others, and some are certainly more likely to be more relevant to
education than others. There is such a deluge of new services that it is often difficult to keep track of
what’s ‘out there’ or to make sense of what each provides. I suggest there are two ways of helping
with this process. Firstly, to make sense of what the service is trying to do in the context of the overall
Web 2.0 ‘big ideas’ presented in section three. Secondly, as new services become available they can
be categorised roughly in terms of what they attempt to do, e.g. aggregate user data, construct a social
network etc.
