What is Web 2.0?
The original World-Wide Web (‘The Web’, WWW, or ‘Web 1.0′) was a collection of mostly static websites that published information. You could visit the sites, read the webpages, look at the pictures, but you couldn’t really interact with the site: you couldn’t login, leave comments, tag images, discuss things, etc. The original Web was a mostly one-way experience where information was delivered to you.
‘Web 2.0′ (pronounced “web two-point-oh”) is the (slightly annoying) name given to the the recent development of interactive websites that are quite different to the old, static websites.
Many websites on the Web today allow users to:
- shareinformation (e.g. notes and photos on Facebook)
- interact(add comments, chat, etc.)
- collaborateon content (e.g. creating pages on Wikipedia)
- create their own content (e.g. videos on YouTube)
Web 2.0 is often called the ‘Social Web‘ because of the way that users can interact and share. It’s also been called the ‘Read-Write Web’ because much of the content is now written by users (they’re not just reading)
