Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is a term originally coined by Tim O'Reilly to describe what many see as a new trends in Web design, development and usage, and an accompanying commercial and cultural 'rebirth' of the Web from the "dot com" bust. O'Reilly describes it as the business shift that arises from the rise of the "Internet as platform" (much as, in the technology industry, operating systems and application software before would go to make a platform).

The characteristics of services that are labelled as being 'Web 2.0' are some kind of participatory component ('social software' was a phrase used to describe software that improved in functionality and usefulness as more people used it), ubiquity (with services being offered both through a web browser and on other websites through widgets, on the desktop, on mobile devices and through large numbers of partner channels), remixability (data from a number of services being 'mashed-up'), utilisation of social networking, collective intelligence and the idea of hosting applications and services in the 'cloud' rather than on servers that a person owns.

A variety of technical standards and innovations can be said to have led to the success of the Web 2.0 idea: the standardisation of XML and later JSON as data formats for simple interchange and the availability of simple APIs (often using Representational State Transfer - or REST - principles), as well as the coming of age of JavaScript and Ajax for client-side scripting.