What is Web 2.0?

I think this is a primary question in everyone who has heard of this Web 2.0. People brag about being experts in Web 2.0 technologies in their resumes or cv's, businessmen seek to use it to make their presence on the web meet the latest trends, bloggers and technology magazines consistently discuss it making it the hottest topic in IT world since recently.

I guess it came into picture when Google released GMail, with a lot of features people never realized or noticed that the web world can produce. They did it at the right time, when there was broadband everywhere, when pages started to load faster.

Web 2.0 is not a technology, it's rather a trend or set of concepts with which you can make traditional HTML pages more user interactive, and ofcourse highly attractive. With Web 2.0, pages are designed never to leave the user with a blank screen when a Submit or Post button is clicked. It behaves like a desktop application always indicating to the user what the system is doing at the moment.

Tim O'Reilly (founder of O'Reilly Media) says about Web 2.0,"Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform."

Social networking sites such as Orkut, Facebook etc, have used these concepts to the full and have attracted a huge amount of users to their sites.

Web 2.0 is the talk of the town now. Atleast for the moment. And it has been there for a while now. That has given way to the birth of many many tools and software packages that can help you do the job easily. Basically the simplest way to use the concept is with the powerful but underrated JavaScript language. It is recognized by almost every browser and yes, GMail, the mother of new generation web is using it. Other tools are mainly Flash and DLLs etc.

The one I love the most in JavaScript tools is JQuery. You should check it out if you are a techie
http://jquery.com/