// Ajax and Web 2.0
Web 2.0 refers to a perceived second-generation of Web based communities and hosted services, such as social networking sites, wikis and folksonomies, that facilitate collaboration and sharing between users. A Web 2.0 website may exhibit some basic common characteristics. The most important one is so called “Internet as platform” and it means delivering and allowing users to use applications entirely through a browser. Also users are owning the data on the site and exercising control over it. Another common thing in Web 2.0 websites is the architecture of participation and democracy that encourages users to add value to the application as they use it. This stands in sharp contrast to hierarchical access-control in applications, in which systems categorize users into roles with varying levels of functionality.
Since Ajax can be a useful approach for making web applications with very rich behavior, it is commonly used in some Web 2.0 applications. It is important to understand that Ajax and Web 2.0 are not the same thing. Ajax doesn't have anything to do with the read/write web, which is what web 2.0 is about. But it is true that these two technologies are complementing each other very well.
In conclusion, we may say that Web 2.0 and Ajax are the technologies of the future and they are the basis in creating rich, interactive and user-friendly interfaces. Democracy is one of the main things in the new generation applications. It is about giving users the freedom to change or add information as they are using the application. In the recent years it was proven to be a successful decision because users like to have a little bit of control over things.
The collaboration of Ajax and Web 2.0 is a perfect example of the development and progress of web technologies in completely different and innovative direction. Web applications are starting to act more like standalone applications and websites are becoming more dynamic, interactive and user-friendly.
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