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Web 2.0 is referred to as the “participatory web” because of its attribute that facilitates interactive information sharing, reciprocal operating, user-centered designing and collaborating on the world wide web which includes web-based communities, hosted services, social-networking and video-sharing sites, and blogs among others. This development implies cumulative changes in the manner software developers and end-users explore the web.

Web 2.0 websites enable the users to interact among themselves or to change website content which greatly differs from the traditional websites which are non-interactive wherein users only passively view the web content provided to them without the privilege of modifying it for it is only the site’s owner who can introduce modifications. The Web 2.0 websites also allow the users to run software applications entirely through a browser and encourage them to add value to the application as they use it. The users can also own and control the data on a site. These sites often feature a high-degree, user-friendly interface based on Ajax and similar client-side interactivity frameworks or full client-server application frameworks in resemblance.

Among the technological features and techniques of this application are search, links, authoring, tags, extensions, and signals. With its search feature, the user finds information easily through keyword search. The links provide guides to other related and relevant information. Authoring paves the way for the creation of constantly updating content over a platform. Tags enable content categorization. Extensions give powerful algorithms that leverage the web as an application platform as well as a document server. Signals denote the use of RSS technology to quickly notify users of content changes.
Blogs, wikis, and RSS manifest the attributes of Web 2.0 in the usage of tools that allow the readers to add comments or to edit contents. This is known as the Read/Write web. The client-side/web browser technologies most often used in Web 2.0 development are Asynchronous Java Script and XML (Ajax), Adobe Flash, and Java Script/Ajax frameworks.
Besides the rich user experience that Web 2.0 has to offer along with user participation facility, forceful content, metadata, web standards and scalability, this application also denotes openness, freedom and collective intelligence generated from the participating users. Hence, this provides for a very enriching and more challenging as well as exciting web exploration experience in a broader web horizon.