Characteristics
Web 2.0 websites allow users to do more than just retrieve information. By increasing what was already possible in "Web 1.0", they provide the user with more user-interface, software and storage facilities, all through their browser. This has been called "network as platform" computing. Major features of Web 2.0 include social networking sites, user created web sites, self-publishing platforms, tagging, and social bookmarking. Users can provide the data that is on a Web 2.0 site and exercise some control over that data. These sites may have an "architecture of participation" that encourages users to add value to the application as they use it. Some scholars have put forth cloud computing as an example of Web 2.0 because cloud computing is simply an implication of computing on the Internet.
The concept of Web-as-participation-platform captures many of these characteristics. Bart Decrem, a founder and former CEO of Flock, calls Web 2.0 the "participatory Web" and regards the Web-as-information-source as Web 1.0.
Web 2.0 offers all users the same freedom to contribute. While this opens the possibility for serious debate and collaboration, it also increases the incidence of "spamming" and "trolling" by unscrupulous or misanthropic users. The impossibility of excluding group members who don’t contribute to the provision of goods from sharing profits gives rise to the possibility that serious members will prefer to withhold their contribution of effort and free ride on the contribution of others. This requires what is sometimes called radical trust by the management of the website. According to Best, the characteristics of Web 2.0 are: rich user experience, user participation, dynamic content, metadata, web standards and scalability. Further characteristics, such as openness, freedom and collective intelligence by way of user participation, can also be viewed as essential attributes of Web 2.0.
The key features of Web 2.0 include:
- Folksonomy; free classification of information
- A rich user experience
- A user as a contributor
- Long tail
- User participation
- Basic trust
- Dispersion
Read more about this topic: Web 3.0