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Web 2.0 websites allow users to do more than just retrieve information. By increasing what was already possible in "Web 1.0", they provide the user with more user-interface, software and storage facilities, all through their browser. This has been called "network as platform" computing.[2] Major features of Web 2.0 include social networking sites, user created web sites, self-publishing platforms, tagging, and social bookmarking. Users can provide the data that is on a Web 2.0 site and exercise some control over that data.[2][15] These sites may have an "architecture of participation" that encourages users to add value to the application as they use it.[1][2] Some scholars have put forth cloud computing as an example of Web 2.0 because cloud computing is simply an implication of computing on the Internet.[16] The concept of Web-as-participation-platform captures many of these characteristics. Bart Decrem, a founder and former CEO of Flock, calls Web 2.0 the "participatory Web"[17] and regards the Web-as-information-source as Web 1.0. Web 2.0 offers all users the same freedom to contribute. While this opens the possibility for serious debate and collaboration, it also increases the incidence of "spamming" and "trolling" by unscrupulous or misanthropic users. The impossibility of excluding group members who don’t contribute to the provision of goods from sharing profits gives rise to the possibility that serious members will prefer to withhold their contribution of effort and free ride on the contribution of others.[18] This requires what is sometimes called radical trust by the management of the website. According to Best,[19] the characteristics of Web 2.0 are: rich user experience, user participation, dynamic content, metadata, web standards and scalability. Further characteristics, such as openness, freedom[20] and collective intelligence[21] by way of user participation, can also be viewed as essential attributes of Web 2.0.

The client-side (web browser) technologies used in Web 2.0 development include Ajax and JavaScript frameworks such as YUI Library, Dojo Toolkit, MooTools, jQuery and Prototype JavaScript Framework. Ajax programming uses JavaScript to upload and download new data from the web server without undergoing a full page reload. To allow users to continue to interact with the page, communications such as data requests going to the server are separated from data coming back to the page (asynchronously). Otherwise, the user would have to routinely wait for the data to come back before they can do anything else on that page, just as a user has to wait for a page to complete the reload. This also increases overall performance of the site, as the sending of requests can complete quicker independent of blocking and queueing required to send data back to the client.