I had a recent discussion with a report who was asking what Web 2.0 was all about, and why AJAX is always used in the same breath as Web 2.0. After all, isn’t AJAX a technology and Web 2.0 a concept, or strategy?
Yes, but there’s also something else to this discussion. I came across a great blog entry that answers both of these questions in small package:
All the technologies that are thought of as “Web 2.0″ serve to lessen the cognitive distance between want and fulfillment. We want news, but we don’t want to seek it out: RSS. We want to bookmark pages, but we don’t want to have versionitis between our multiple devices: delicious. We want to share photos without setting up our own gallery: Flickr. We want gratification of requests without the full HTTP request cycle: AJAX.
Excellent way to sum up this whole Web 2.0 thing.
