6 THE INTERNET
Web 2.0: Real change or hype?
Around the year 2005, a series of radical developments appeared to be changing the way the Internet was used. Large numbers of new online services such as video sharing and social networking were being developed, and huge numbers of people were signing up to use them. For some writers the changes were so significant they used the term ‘Web 2.0’ to describe them. In software engineering, when a new version of a software package is a huge improvement on the old version, the convention is to add one to the number before the decimal, so that 1.0 becomes 2.0, for example. Where the transition is more gradual, one is added after the decimal. Other writers, however, felt that the term Web 2.0 was unhelpful and the changes were evolutionary rather than revolutionary. So, which view is correct? The best way to analyze Web 2.0 is to identify its key technologies and services. By looking at each service in the context of the developments in web technology which made it possible, we can evaluate the nature of the changes.
The first development we should look at is the creation of static
websites. Initially, these consisted of mainly text-based web pages, with the occasional image. The pages were written in HyperText Markup Language (HTML), which allowed the writer to vary the size, colour and emphasis of the text, and to include hypertext links to other web pages. Some websites contained forms which allowed users to submit their details, but otherwise the pages were fixed and there was little interactivity. Over time, static websites became bigger, and web pages began to be spidered, indexing the pages so they could be found by search engines. They also began to use more graphics, and to link to document and video files which could be downloaded by users and viewed on desktop applications.
The next stage to consider is the development of dynamic
websites. These sites used server-side scripting languages to extract data from databases, which was then used to create web pages. One of the most popular languages was PHP (Pre- Hypertext Processor), an open source product. From 1998 onwards, PHP was routinely used with three other open source products – the Linux operating system, Apache web server and MySQL database packages – to power dynamic websites, giving rise to the term LAMP stack. Server-side scripting languages made it easy to move data between active web pages and databases, making bulletin boards, blog services and early versions of social networking services possible. Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, also grew from this technology. However,
these developments were limited by the need to load complete pages each time new data was selected from the database, which made them relatively slow.
It was against this background that Flash and Ajax, the two
technologies seen as key to Web 2.0, emerged. A major component of Web 2.0 was the way in which users could directly access visual and audio-visual material in their browser. The first release of Flash was introduced in 1996 as a freely available web-based animation program which would run in a browser plug-in or add-on. The software subsequently went through many incremental changes and became increasingly popular. When a version was released in 2003 which included video streaming, a very high proportion of web browsers had the plug-in installed. Flash fundamentally altered the way in which users could access visual and audio-visual material. Flickr, the online photo album service and YouTube, the video sharing service, which both launched in 2005, were among the first to use and to benefit from the new features of the Flash package. By 2010, Flickr was hosting five billion images and YouTube was serving over two billion videos per day. The other technology associated with Web 2.0 was Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), a client-side scripting language which allowed elements of a page to be refreshed without reloading the whole page. This allowed web pages to become almost as interactive as desktop applications.
An important effect of these technologies was on the use of
peer-to-peer technologies for accessing audio and video content. Since the late 1990s, users have exchanged music and video files over these networks, much of it copyright material. By making it possible to listen to music and to watch video online, there was less need to download files using P2P in order to share files, and so this type of Internet traffic experienced a drop. However, the fall was gradual and P2P remains popular for higher quality video, games and other materials, as well as in geographical areas with low bandwidth. Although not everyone agrees on how significant technologies such as P2P will continue to be, there is little doubt that the developments associated with Web 2.0 have changed the way we interact online for good.
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