A STUDY ON THE CURRENT STATUS OF THE UTILIZATION OF WEB 2.0 TECHNOLOGY AMONG POPULAR THAI WEBSITES Wudhijaya Philuek #1 Atchara Rueangprathum #2 Chun Che Fung #3 # 1,3 School of Information Technology, Murdoch University Murdoch, WA 6150, Australia # 2 Faculty of Science and Technology, Suratthani Rajabhat University Muang, Suratthani 84100 Thailand #1 W.Philuek@murdoch.edu.au #2 rueangprathum@gmail.com #3 l.fung@murdoch.edu.au ABSTRACT A study on the current status of the utilization of Web 2.0 Technology among the popular websites in Thailand has been carried out. This aims to investigate the spread of Web 2.0 Technology and to determine quantitatively the existing Web 2.0 Technology being used. This project adopted a quantitative method in surveying on a number of Thai popular websites in ten business categories according to http://truehits.net website. The ten categories of websites include Business, Education, and others. This paper also considered eight types of technology used among these websites. This includes Blogs, Wikis, Social Networking and a number of other facilities. The research finding provides an overview of the current status of utilization of Web 2.0 Technology in Thailand. The use of Web 2.0 Technology in other countries is also considered with reference to the situation in Thailand. This study aims to encourage and promote Web 2.0 Technology and subsequent study will lead to the next phase of further investigation and recommendations. Index terms – Web 2.0 technology, Thai websites 1. INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND OF RESEARCH Web 2.0 Technology has been introduced and is beginning to become popular in Thailand. However, Web 2.0 Technology is not a single technology nor it is only used for limited purposes. Rather, it is a collection of technologies and they have been utilized in many areas. Recently, various communities in Thailand are beginning to adopt and increasing the use of Web 2.0 Technology. This includes business, education and professional bodies, however, there has not been any projects to evaluated or assess the status of the utilization of Web 2.0 Technology in Thailand. This therefore provided the motivation of this study. The term ‘Web 2.0’ was officially coined in 2004 by Dale Dougherty, vice-president of O’Reilly Media Inc. during a team discussion on a potential future conference about the Web. The team wanted to capture the feeling that despite the dot-com boom and subsequent bust, the Web was ‘more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity’ [1]. Understanding “the Web” and “Web 2.0” helps to consider the issues associated with each of these technologies. For example, Tim O’ Reilly identifies what he considered to be the factors contributed to the success of “Web 1.0” and “Web 2.0”. He was concerned that, “Web 2.0 has become widespread that companies and organizations are now pasting it on as marketing buzzword, with no real understanding of what it means” [1]. In order to express the concept of Web 2.0 Technology, he listed and described seven principles as: the Web as a platform, Harnessing Collective Intelligence, Data is the next “Intel inside”, End of the software release cycle, Lightweight programming model, Software above the level of single device, and Rich user experience [1]. Moreover, it was noted that companies that had survived the dot-com firestorms of the late 90s have appeared to be stronger and have a number of common characteristics in general. Thus it is important to note that the term was not coined in an attempt to capture the essence of an identifiable group of technologies, but an attempt to capture the developments which are far more amorphous. Web 2.0 Technology consists of a variety of applications implemented using diverse technologies. In general, the