Web 2.0

Abstract

The static world that we looked at in the last chapter was just the beginning. Once web sites became the norm on the Internet, capturing people’s attention with interactivity and speed became necessary. A landslide of technical updates over the next decade helped the Web mature into a stable platform for serious development and web applications. The need for speed has changed the Internet and the people using it. The tools and technologies that we have today enable us to communicate at such incredible speeds that our view of the world has become instantaneous. We send a text and expect a reply back within a few minutes, we tweet and recieve tweets from the most recent events as they are happening, and live streaming has become very popular on most social media platforms. This instantaneous environment has been enabled by the Internet, but how did it get transformed from being slow, clunky, and static into fast, dynamic, and responsive? These are some of the questions that we explore in this chapter.