Web 2.0

The challenge for Web 1.0 (as we would like to call the earlier wave of Internet) has been to involve the end users in a collaborative, seamless, peer-to-peer fashion in an economical and reliable manner and at the same time ensuring rich user experience. Rich user experience and a sense of affinity are two critical aspects of Web 2.0 and play an important role in encouraging collaborative information exchange. Customer and partner facing processes using Web 2.0 have the potential to not only radically transform peer-to-peer collaboration, but also inter-entity collaborations and commerce by enabling various types and combinations of business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B), Consumer-to-consumer (C2C), business-to-government (B2G) etc. collaboration and commerce. The interplay between the emerging Web 2.0 paradigm and the already popular paradigm of SOA seems is of special interest owing to the complementarities between the two. While Web 2.0 can offer an intelligent, rich, customizable, and interactive service consumer base for a service provider, SOA can offer the standardized conduit for the enterprise information and data to be consumed by Web 2.0 applications.