What is Web 2.0 Anyway?

When you discuss Web 2.0 functionality with a systems architect, they usually have lots of questions when I tell them that iEnfluence will be a Web 2.0 website for the real estate industry. Since the phrase originated more from a marketing perspective, I was asked to define details around the actual requirements of the system to translate that into firm technical requirements. Which believe me, wasn’t easy to do, but had to be done.

For some people, Web 2.0 simply means pastel colors, rounded edges, and a clutter-free web interface. For others, it means social networking or tagging. Still, for others, it means a more rich client-side experience, with lots of AJAX and Flex. So one of the first things I had to do for our systems architect was explain exactly what we want this website to do. By distilling Web 2.0 down to a set of desired features, the systems architect can begin to determine what the system’s architecture should consist of. And many times this comes down to good old fashioned systems analysis and design.

As a general overview, let’s take a look at the top three most popular features that are mentioned when people are discussing Web 2.0.

1. Social networking
“Social networking” is a marketing phrase wrapped within the “Web 2.0″ marketing phrase. It is a huge category of functionality that can be just as vague as Web 2.0. Overall, it includes the following features:

* Creating online profiles
* Adding friends to my profile, and the ability to follow their activities, as well as their friends
* Posting content and sharing it with my friends
* Allowing friends to comment on various subjects, including posted content
* Enabling online voting
* Dynamic notification of any change in a friend’s status
* Posting questions online and getting answers from others, and searching for other posted topics (such as forums)

2. A rich front-end experience

Many times, a website will claim that it is Web 2.0 because of a new styling trend in front-end website design. This trend often dictates a very simplified and streamlined design, free of clutter, and with lighter or pastel colors. Other bells and whistles include some light client-side animation, to enable dynamic “pop in, pop out” notifications to the user, without the need to refresh the web page.

3. Content categorization and searchability
There is no way to manage the overwhelming amount of web content without some way to categorize and search for it. While this feature set has often been considered part of Web 2.0, it really started long before that term existed. The requirement that we are trying to satisfy is, “I need to find all of the things I care about, and none of the things I don’t care about.” To accomplish this, the Web 2.0 community typically advocates the following capabilities:

* Tagging content with my own descriptive keywords
* Voting on the quality of content, to provide relevance and weight
* Providing deep link-a-bility to websites, opening up their content to other outside websites
* Utilizing advanced search capabilities that can search on similar terms, as well as searching meta information (e.g., tags)

While this is not an exhaustive look at the technology behind Web 2.0, it does provide a broad overview of the nuts & bolts to some of the more popular features. In the end, as always, it comes down to making sure that you are designing a system that supports your audience’s needs, and then implementing the proper technology to support those requirements. From an architectural perspective, there is very little that is truly new here. We still need web servers, SSL certificates, encryption capabilities, security, database servers, and a well thought out object-oriented design. That’s what good architecture has always been about, and it will remain true for Web 3.0… and beyond.