1.1 Preface
The term “Web 2.0” has been discussed a lot in recent years [1]. About the term
“Web 2.0”, it is not a technical noun but more suitable to be a collective concept describing the technical features and social behaviors of some of the famous Web 2.0 websites. It begins to be hot in the opening talk of the first Web 2.0 conference. Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle summarized what they though as the themes of Web 2.0.
They both agreed that the Web had become a platform, with software above the level of a single device, leveraging the power of the “Long Tail” [2], and with data as a driving force.
Web 2.0 has become a very hot subject, there are about seventy-million web pages related to “Web 2.0” on Google search engine. Among them, there are almost twenty-three million results which discuss “Web 2.0 design” shown in Figure 1-1.
How to build a Web 2.0 website is a large research which many website designers want to study.
1.2 Motivation
Web 2.0 has numerous definitions, but one of them obtains the identification of most people. That is information sharing and the content of website can be changed by every user’s participation. One of the most famous examples is WIKIPEDIA [3], which is a free, open and on-line encyclopedia. Every user can edit the content of the on-line encyclopedia. Another famous Web 2.0 website is del.icio.us [4]. It is a bookmarkers sharing website, every user can make bookmarkers for articles and share their bookmarkers to others. Web 2.0 websites often provide functionalities permitting users to share their knowledge on it.
Unfortunately, the mass of researches all put attentions on how to take advantage of technique for building a powerful Web 2.0 website. The thesis focuses on how to provide a simple method allowing the Web 1.0 websites to achieve the functionality of information sharing. The method must be easy enough to allow the Web 1.0 website developers to handle it lightly. In addition, the interface of the functionality should be very friendly, and it must combine to the original web page closely. There are three ways to construct a Web 2.0 website. One is to build a whole new Web 2.0 website from the scratch. Another way is to rewrite the page of Web 1.0 website. The third is to enhance a traditional Web 1.0 website to Web 2.0. Both of the first two ways often take a lot of time and need some new skills about Web 2.0. In the thesis,
we focus on the third method. Until now, there are few effective methods to achieve the goal. Hence, the thesis proposes an easy way to upgrade those Web 1.0 websites without rebuilding them. The only thing they have to do is to ask their users to install Web2.0 Toolbar on their browsers. The method not only supports a very simple way but also satisfies the needs of both web developers and users.
1.3 Research Objectives
The objectives of our framework can be summarized as the following four parts:
Simple and effective way to upgrade websites
The most important thing for these Web 1.0 website developers is that the strategy to enhance their websites must be very simple and effective. These developers do not want to learn any more technique or spend more time to do some changes on their websites and can upgrade their websites outstandingly. We must provide the using of the strategy as easy as possible.
User friendly interface
This thesis provides a strategy to combine the original Web 1.0 web page and additional Web 2.0 services. Integrating two difference objects may cause a problem – inharmonious sense, so how to design a friendly interface for users is a major purpose.
The system must be not only simply for website developers but also easy for website users.
Support for mainstream browser
Figure 1-2: Browser Market Share in April 2008
According the browser market share survey [5] (Figure 1-2), Microsoft Internet Explorer is still far and away the most dominant browser on the Web, with 75.26 % usage market share, and Firefox has increased its share to 17.28%, and the other alternatives, such as Safari, Netscape, Opera, and Mozilla, occupy the remaining share.
The toolbar should work with at the most popular browser - Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Easy to develop and expand
The developing of Web 2.0 is still continued. There may appear more and more practical functions in the future. Although our system can not achieve all the services of Web 2.0, but also must provide a flexible platform to develop and expand. In order to achieve the goal, we must separate our system and the original websites as much as possible. It also responds to the first objective, to make the architecture simple and effective.
1.4 Outline of the thesis
The thesis contains seven chapters. In Chapter 2, we discuss the background of Web 2.0 websites development and the IE toolbar and then introduce the other researches to build Web 2.0 websites. In Chapter 3, we propose the architecture of our system, and discuss the purpose and responsibility of each component. For deep understanding, we describe the implementation details and the design method in Chapter 4. We demonstrate the platform of our system to present the results in Chapter 5. In Chapter 6, we give the conclusion and future works for our system.
Finally, Chapter 7 is our references.