Web 2.0, Social Programming, and Mashups -What is in for me!"

I gave an invited lecture about on Web 2.0 to students in the "Foundations of Internet Technologies" course, at the University of Cyprus. This tutorial was extended and presented again to many colleagues at the computer science department, with a new title "Web 2.0, Social Programming, and Mashups -What is in it for me!" In this tutorial you can see many examples of Web 2.0 websites and mashups. In fact it is very interesting to talk about Web 2.0 and how the big companies (e.g. Google, Yahoo, YouTube, and many others) are taking the lead, encouraging us to contribute, and providing all possible user-friendly interfaces.

As users, we find this is amazing. We feel we have to join these social websites, contribute with content, review products, upload photos and videos, write blogs, and socialize and date through our computers. However, I suspect many of the social websites will fail because of the privacy crises that may come soon. Many users are not aware with the hacking and openness of those websites. Let's wait and see!

From a research viewpoint, I believe Web 2.0. has created a great opportunity for researchers to build on the RSS and Mashup technologies.... which is currently leading to Web 3.0, or I like to call it Semantic Pipes. In other words, Semantic-based Mashups. One way to achieve this (but maybe there are other ways) is to mashup RDF data using SPARQL.