WEB 2.0 Pros and Cons

The article What is web 2.0 (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html) gave an overview that clearly describe the community nature of web2.0 contrasts between traditional web 1.0 applications.

The phrase “Collective Intelligence” is a good summary of the source of power for Web 2.0 applications. This collective Intelligence is a natrual trend and made possible through the "network as platform" paradigm shift. The paradigm itself does not have pros or cons.

Whereas in the past a broad of editors will author and edit the Britannica, there is no way that this model could covers each and every subject area that would be interested to everyone. Although the notion of direct user editable contents sometimes degrade the quality of the information, collectively the increase in collaboration effort had enhanced both the depth and width of the information, for example, in wikipedia.org.

One major building block of Web 2.0 is AJAX. This enables dynamic web page without page reloading and make it possible to creation applications INSIDE browser without using fat client or heavy loaded technology like JAVA.

While AJAX is attractive, it does have limitation in backward compability with older browsers and creates accessibility problem for people with access problem. User interface element behaviour changes like browser back key under the AJAX environment also creates usabillity issues.