Web 2.0

The commercialization of the Internet has a drastic impact on culture and business. One of these is the World Wide Web or "the Web". The Web is a set of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. Through a web browser, the user can view web pages containing texts, images and other multimedia and navigate them using hyperlinks. Since mid 1990s, web development has been one of the fastest growing industries in the world. From personal websites to interactive social community website, the web development has gone far enough to ease the lifestyle of the people.

Today, most of the website contains interactive contents that follows the Web 2.0 standard. Web 2.0 is the second generation of web development and design. Its purpose is to facilitate communication, secure information sharing and collaboration on the World Wide Web. This standard allows users to do more than just retrieving information. Web 2.0 concepts led to development and evolution of some web-based applications and communities such as social networking sites (Friendster, Facebook), video hosting (YouTube), wikis and blogs. It typically include some of the following features/techniques acronymed as SLATES which stands for Search Links Authoring Tags Extensions and Signals. Web 2.0 initiatives are being deployed in the Government that is also known as Government 2.0. Schools are also using this standard to reach out and engage with the Generation Y. Examples of these are Facebook, YouTube and MySpace.

Even though there have some critics regarding Web 2.0, it is still widely used in some areas especially in social networking aspects. Even those who are at home earns a hefty amount of cash just by developing web pages using Web 2.0 standard. Nothing can stop the continuing evolution of the Web 2.0, it even has a rumor about the Web 3.0. But it's another story ;-) ..