| First, Web 2.0 Do Theory,
and
the description of the basic concepts, you can find in this webpage. Second, in the other page, Web 2 Do Practice, the practical issues of web-2-do-ing, that is, the manifold of optimizations, from advertising to free stuff, are discussed, made mostly of my previous posts in this blog. Third, the Web 2.0 progress, development, and changes about the theory and practice you an follow in the Web 2.0 Do Blog. And our slogan:
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B |
H y p e r l i n k T a b l e o f C o n t e n t s
PART TWO: WHAT IS WEB 2.O? - DESCRIPTION & DEFINITIONS
1. THE
WEB IS A PLATFORM ENVIRONMENT
>> EXAMPLE: NETSCAPE VERSUS GOOGLE
>> SOFTWARE VERSUS PLATFORM: A PLATFORM BEATS AN APPLICATION EVERY TIME
>> EXAMPLE: DOUBLECLICK VERSUS OVERTURE AND ADSENSE
>> EXAMPLE: AKAMAI VERSUS BITTORRENT
3. HARNESSING COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE
>> THE ARCHITECTURE OF PARTICIPATION
>> BLOGGING AND THE WISDOM OF THE CROWDS
>> SOCIAL NETWORK SITES: RELATIONS, RELATIONS, RELATIONS,…
>> DATA IS THE NEXT <INTEL INSIDE>>
6. INFOWARE: THE WEB 2.0 SOFTWARE
>> THE PERPETUAL BETA: END OF THE SOFTWARE RELEASE CYCLE
>> LOOSE SYSTEMS - LIGHTWEIGHT PROGRAMMING MODELS
8. SOFTWARE ABOVE THE LEVEL OF A SINGLE DEVICE
9. SUMMARY: WEB 2.0 DESIGN PATTERNS - THE PRINCIPLESThis web2do.biz is about how to do Web 2.0, and more. You could ask, what's the need of all that crap on this site? To sum up, advertising and search engine optimization gives you hits, gives you visitors. Turning into Web 2.0, makes the visitors staying. Conversion optimization gives you profit, and bureaucracy optimization let's you keep your profit. Free stuff optimization make customers to come back. And so on. At least, this is what people dream.
Before to plough in, I have to remark, that Web 2.0 is not a new kind of software. It's a new level, or a new phase, or a new way to structure websites, a new way to web service, new design patterns and business models, etc, reachable by implementing a collection of ideas, principles and methods.
This page about Web 2.0 theory contains about 12,000+ words, a bit longish reading for the web audience. By the stats, sometimes even 12 words looks like too long on a website. Well, we can always hope. Enjoy! (If you can enjoy funny geek talk about the web...) The other page, about Web 2 Do practice, is about as much as this one. We wish you a pleasant reading.
>> Go to the top of the page * * * >> Go to the Web 2.0 Blog
Historically, the bursting of the dot-com bubble in the fall of 2001 marked a turning point for the web. The majority of people concluded that the web was overhyped, when in fact bubbles and consequent shakeouts appear to be a common feature of all technological revolutions. The majority of economy and finance-minded people
thought that shakeouts typically mark the point at which an ascendant technology is ready to take its place at center stage. The pretenders
fall out, the real things stay, and you can finally see what's the difference
between them. Financial experts also thought that companies, that do not have any sustenance, were purged from web. This is not the case.
Just another majority of people thought that all that is simply suspicious bullshit, and the whole thing was arranged on such a way that a small group of people could steal the money of a big group of people, of people who bought shares. As usual, opinions differ.
Let's look at two companies that survived. Amazon.com, that was founded 1995. If
you did look up any financial analysis at the time of the dot com bubble, you
could see that Amazon rolls its debt before itself (even today), like an ant
rolls a ball, as big as a council block. With other words, Amazon is actually a
pyramid scheme, the new orders paying the old debt. They should be investigated
as a scam, but the investigators also seem to like Amazon. For me personally it's the only way I buy books on the web, and I always hope it won't burst before I get my
ordered books.
Google.com was registered 1997, and survived without greater problems. With fundamental analysis we can see, that it's assets
wore worth a totally unimportant amount of money. Today they are overvalued more than a million times. But they are just fine. Perhaps the Wall Street chaps should invent a new kind of analysis, which I would call virtual assets, because Amazon, and especially Google has its net worth in that.
Why did these companies thrive? Because their service is so needed, because they made themselves indispensable; they made themselves into Web 2.0 companies.
The concept of "Web 2.0" began with a conference brainstorming session between O'Reilly and MediaLive International.
Of course, tens of thousand other people were also talking about New Web, Web
3.0, 4.0, etc up to 8.0, Super Web, Super Net, Cyber Web and Cyber Net and a lot
of other names. They also had meetings and they also published their opinions,
but it seems that the name Web 2.0 is the winner, up to date. And the winner
takes it all.
Nevertheless there's still a huge amount of disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means. This article is an attempt to clarify just what we mean by Web 2.0. Explaining in two words, Web 2.0 is about people and integration, that is people in the center, and integrated services. Well, "Information Superhighway" and "Cyberspace" were used in their time so much that you felt it comes out even from the water tap, and now they sound ridiculous. Perhaps it will happen also with Web 2.0, if someone will find a truly striking
new expression. Until that, we use it.
If you think this sound like a lot of garbage, then I can say, that most of psychology sounds like that too, but millions of people pays $50 per hour for a psychologist to listen to their garbage. Already thirty years ago books were published, proving that psychoanalysis is more harmful than useful, but it just goes on. It's simply a too good business to give up. Meanwhile, this here garbage is totally free, so you earn $50 per hour by reading. Aren't you? In the initial brainstorming, Web 2.0 was formulated by example, as follows. Let me notice, that many
items on the list looks like goners today, but I left them on for the case of comparison.
|
Web 1.0 |
|
Web 2.0 |
|
DoubleClick |
-->> |
Google AdSense |
|
IVIV |
-->> |
|
|
Ofoto |
-->> |
Tumblr |
|
Akamai |
-->> |
BitTorrent |
|
mp3.com |
-->> |
Napster |
|
Britannica Online |
-->> |
Wikipedia |
|
personal websites |
-->> |
blogging |
|
evite |
-->> |
upcoming.org and EVDB |
|
domain name speculation |
-->> |
search engine optimization |
|
page views |
-->> |
cost per click |
|
screen scraping |
-->> |
web services |
|
publishing |
-->> |
participation |
|
content management systems |
-->> |
wikis |
|
directories (taxonomy) |
-->> |
tagging ("folksonomy") |
|
stickiness |
-->> |
syndication |
The question is also difficult because many of those buzzword-addicted startups are definitely not Web 2.0, while some of the applications identified as Web 2.0, like BitTorrent, are not even properly web applications. I would call them cyberspace applications or virtual applications. To the obvious question that where exactly cyberspace is , I answer that I'll let you know, as soon as I'll get there - and back again.
>> Go to the top of the page * * * >> Go to the Web 2.0 Blog
First we have to decide what a platform is. In the Web 1.0 sense a platform is something about a computer. It can be hardware, that is, a computer architecture, or software, like an operative system or a programming language.
My definition in the Web 2.0 sense, a platform is a node on the web, a site, or
a group of sites, working as a gateway to a batch of different services or
activities. Unfortunately we can't open a door in it yet to step into the
virtual world.
Let's define the differences between software and a platform with a comparison. If software is a stone, then a platform is a rock. And what is the web then? It's the Himalaya, on its way to become as big as Earth. So, we feel that it's not simply a platform, it's an environment. Compared to a rock, Himalaya is a billion times bigger than a rock, and contains stones and rocks of every possibly shapes and materials. It has it's own weather patterns, flora, fauna, and bears several countries on its back. It's the example of the ancient rule, quantity changes quality.
What happened with the web is, the quantity grew with many order of magnitudes higher than a usual platform, and that means changes in the quality. A lot of it. The Internet is a small world in itself; on it's way to become a truly big world. Or, it's already a big world, turning into a Big Big World. And you company could be mostly only a Small Small Girl in it.
Is it wrong then to say the web is a platform? No, from the point of view of web 2.0 programming this is the only right way. But we should never forget that it's also an environment, not comparable to any other platforms, like Unix or Windows. We don't say that the Himalaya is a big rock. The web is unique, it is not only a platform, it is our single environment.
The first principle of this chapter is the title: The Web Is A Platform Environment. - So design your software regarding that.
Two of the initial Web 1.0 exemplars, DoubleClick and Akamai, were both pioneers in treating the web as a platform. People don't often think of it as web services, but in fact, ad services were the first widely deployed web services. Nonetheless, these pioneers provided useful contrasts because Johnny-come-latelys have taken their solution to the same problem even further, understanding something deeper about the nature of the new platform. Both DoubleClick and Akamai were Web 2.0 pioneers, yet we can also see how it's possible to realize more of the possibilities by applying more Web 2.0 design patterns. I mean dinosaurs grew just bigger, stronger and fiercer, but they were wiped out anyway.
And what are the hardware requirements for web 2.0? Physically, as we all know, the web is a net of computers. There are between six hundred millions and one billion computers connected, depending on how you count. As a programmer I think that about one million computers already could create an environment. And one hundred million computers gave the web a stability of presence. On the other hand, for efficient web 2.0 services the broadband is also needed. It's needed not only to the end users, but between the computers that make up the the Internet. Now that broadband is quite common, people want optic cables, data running in it with the speed of light. Demand always goes before technology. It's like love and marriage, or horse and carriage.
>> Go to the top of the page * * * >> Go to the Web 2.0 Blog
If Netscape was the standard bearer for Web 1.0, Google is most certainly the standard bearer for Web 2.0, if only because their respective IPO*s were defining events for each era. So let's start with a comparison of these two companies and their positioning.
*(What's an IPO? Initial Public Offering. By the name you could think this is the process of people offering gifts to the gods, but no. It is the first sale of stock by a company to the public, so we should call it Initial Company Offer perhaps. A company can raise money by issuing either debt or equity.)
Netscape framed "the web as platform" in terms of the old software paradigm: their flagship product was the web browser, coined to "webtop" to replace the desktop, and planned to populate that webtop with information providers who would purchase Netscape servers. Netscape thought they would be the webtop of all Internet roads, but instead they became only a spintop, used by most people fervently and frequently and then put away for good.
It went so that few compnies were willing to buy Netscape servers, while people didn't want to buy Netscape services, many of which emerged free in other sites. Netscape thought small, they believed that one platform could dominate the Internet. They didn't realize the Internet is an environment. Even Internet Explorer, which was able to kill Netscape is used nowadays only web innocents plus lots of lazy corporate users, and has only a third place before Opera, which will also leave IE sometime. The first two is Firefox and Google Chrome. And then there are specialists like Flock, which is designed for social networking. Although I haven't heard yet about a browser for sex, which is incomprehensible, looking at the use and demand. Sure, we only have to wait.
Google, by contrast, began its life as a native web application, never sold or packaged, but delivered as a service, with customers paying, directly or indirectly, for the use of that service. None of the trappings of the old software industry are present. No scheduled software releases, just continuous improvement. No licensing or sale, just usage. No fixed platforms, but accepting any browser. Like the whore who serves all, said a friend of Altavista.
Google's service is not a server--though it is delivered by a massive collection of Internet servers--nor a browser--though it is experienced by the user within the browser. Nor does its flagship search service even host the content that it enables users to find. Google search in fact is a pointer service, like a living phone catalog, where, when you found what you want, instead of a call, you click and will be redirected to the site you are interested in. Like a policeman in a tourist city, continuously pointing out attractions. But Google doesn't have any R & R time, it's always on duty.
While both Netscape and Google could be described as software companies, it's clear that Netscape belonged to the same software world as Lotus, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and other companies that got their start in the 1980's software revolution, while Google's fellows are other Internet applications like eBay, Amazon. Some companies can adapt to the new web, to Web 2.0, while the majority can not. Well, few companies are counting with just being shot at for fun in the web, so they go the way of the dodo, which also only wanted to do its own harmless and private business, but was exterminated.
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In each of its past confrontations with rivals, Microsoft has successfully played the platform card, trumping even the most dominant applications.
I can remember at a time when all companies run WordPerfect as their text
editor. Windows allowed Microsoft to displace Lotus 1-2-3 with Excel, WordPerfect with Word, and Netscape Navigator with Internet Explorer.
At least, for while. Microsoft is as successfull as a haberdasher who would be able to exchange whatever people have to his own junk.
Let's have a definition first, however painful it is: An application programming interface (API) is a special set of specifications and rules for programmers, so that software,
written by that specifications, would be able to communicate with each other. To continue the thought about the Windows platform, the clash isn't between a platform and an application, but, in essence, between two radically different platforms. On the one side,
there is a single software provider, whose massive installed base and tightly integrated operating system and APIs give control over the programming paradigm; on the other, a system without an owner, tied together by a set of protocols, open standards and agreements for cooperation. This second is the web as a platform environment.
Windows was an
acceptable solution to the problems of the early PC era, for application
developers, solving a host of problems that had previously confused the industry. But a single monolithic approach, controlled by a single vendor, is no longer a solution,
nowadays it's a problem. We all have to help to solve it, like pest control
solves the problem of the ubiquitous presence of cockroaches.
Back to the communications-oriented systems, as the web-as-platform most certainly is, what we require is interoperability. And it has to be maintained by all participants together, not dictated by one of them.
Any Web 2.0 vendor that seeks to lock in its application gains by controlling the platform will, by definition, no longer be playing to the strengths of the platform. This is not to say that there are not opportunities for this policy, but they will not be the majority. The companies that succeed in the Web 2.0 era will be those that understand the rules of that new game, rather than trying to go back to the rules of the PC software era. To apply a Chinese saying, we will live in interesting times.
And this is the second principle, shown by the two
examples of this chapter: A Platform
Beats An Application Every Time.
That means, to be successful in the Internet, you should always try to create a platform, not a desktop software. That means making a small platform on a big platform, on an environment, on the web.
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Perhaps this title sounds banal, but think about it. Big companies like Microsoft, Google and others try to impress you, that they are making the web, that is, they are the web. In fact, they are not, far from it. It's like when any distasteful dictator says, that he is his country. Well, practically all of them ends on quite a bad way, and everyone applauds.
But let's make a thought experiment, Einstein's favorite trick. If you would extract Microsoft from the web, what would happen? Actually, nothing. The only most conspicuous change would be that we would have another computer operative system, slightly worse, or slightly better than Windows. (Let me note, that both the use of windows as graphic user interface, and the use of mouse as a general input device, were not the inventions of Microsoft, but the inventions of Apple.) Internet Relay Chat was used long before MSN, a server does not need to use just a Windows OS, and so on. In fact, I would be hard put to mention any truly important thing that was invented by Microsoft. Assessing, we can say that it would be no change with the extraction of Microsoft. Naturally, we can do this thought experiment with almost all of the big web companies, with a similar result.
Now let's extract from the web all the users, and what we get? Nothing but a database of companies. So, in the web 2.0 level, we have to realize the most important principle: Users Make The Web. (Principle #3.)
"The long tail - reach out to the entire web" - this principle needs to be redefined, or at least it needs an explanation, because it's misleading. By this we don't mean you should let grow a tail out of your spine, and dangle it into virtual space. Quite the opposite. (Q: Does it mean that the web is a tailed animal? A: No.)
Let me note, that I get in contact with a lot of people who are Internet innocents.
They have some intriguing questions.
What does this principle mean then? We know that in fact, small sites make up the bulk of the internet's content; narrow niches make up the bulk of internet's the possible applications. Therefore: Leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head.
Well, I'm sure "reach out to the entire web," sounds good. The question that springs to mind, how? I wrote and updated a study throughout the years about web advertisement, while I've just tried everything there is to try. As a summary I can say that most of the advertisement methods are not working, are fake, or their effects are negligible. And "tricks" of the self-appointed Internet gurus are usually swindles. It's funny to read a new pitch page, saying, that "I know most Internet gurus are fakes, but this is the real thing," knowing that it's only a new scam in the line. Read about scam in my "Spiteful Blog." Another thought is that we could call this principle also "The Long Hand", as people are usually reaching out with their hands, not with their tails.
To sum up, there is no way to reach out to the entire web. If someone says it to you that they can, then you can be sure it's a scam. A single company can't reach out more than to the liver, or the left knee of the web. But there is a solution. So, actually what reach out to the entire web means, make your site so desirable, so useful, so much needed, so much "in," that the entire web would want to reach it. To sum up, the third principle is: make the entire web to reach out to your site. Or, as this slogen was spread throughout the web,
The Long Tail: Reach Out To The Entire Web. (Rule #4)
This kind of wrongly coined slogan is quite usual in the web, and computing. But then a hot dog is not a dog cooked into the state of heat, either.
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Like Google, DoubleClick is a true child of the Internet era. It harnesses software as a service, has a core competency in data management, and, as noted above, was a pioneer in web services long before web services even had a name. However, DoubleClick was ultimately limited by its business model. It bought into the '90s notion that the web was about publishing, not participation; that advertisers, not consumers, ought to call the shots; that size mattered, and that the Internet was increasingly being dominated by the top websites as measured by MediaMetrix and other web ad scoring companies. We all know that ads are made to persuade you to buy something that you neither want nor need, but advertising just goes on. Nowadays hardly anyone heard of DoubleClick, but its users.
DoubleClick
proudly cites on its website "over 2000 successful implementations" of
its software, serving thousands. Google AdSense,
by contrast, already serves many millions of advertisers. Google also figured
out how to enable ad placement on virtually any web page. What's more, they stay
clear of ad-agency like advertising formats such as banner ads and popups in
favor of minimally intrusive, context-sensitive, consumer-friendly text
advertising.
Like DoubleClick, Akamai is optimized to do business with the head, not the tail, with the center, not the edges. While it serves the benefit of the individuals at the edge of the web by smoothing their access to the high-demand sites at the center, it collects its revenue from those central sites. That means that as a paid service, it never can really compete with Bittorrent or the likes, which
is completely free. (Read about the "Something for Nothing" syndrome in the
Optimization page.
BitTorrent, like other pioneers in the P2P movement, takes a radical approach to Internet decentralization. Every client is also a server; files are broken up into fragments that can be served from multiple locations, transparently harnessing the network of downloaders to provide both bandwidth and data to other users. The more popular the file, in fact, the faster it can be served, as there are more users providing bandwidth and fragments of the complete file. People who use it say that they love to get things free, while creative people, and especially noncreative company executives that hoarded the copyrights of creative people, say that it's a simple theft.
BitTorrent thus demonstrates a key Web 2.0 principle: a web service should be designed so that it automatically gets better the more people use it. While Akamai must add servers to improve service, every BitTorrent consumer brings his own resources to the party. There's an implicit "architecture of participation", a built-in ethic of cooperation, in which the service acts primarily as an intelligent broker, connecting the edges to each other and harnessing the power of the users themselves. It's like classical music was before the technological age: every one of a company took his musical instrument, they began to play, and they created music - something over the simple
sum of parts. Well, some people say that even an underground pop group creates music. Take your pick.
Why should we admire this kind of added-value phenomenon like BitTorrent if it works automatically? Well, because it doesn't. The software must be programmed on that way,
and people have to use it, in flocks.
A
Web 2.0 Service Should Get
Better The More People Use It.
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Some systems are designed to encourage participation. There are three ways to build a large database. The first, shown by Yahoo, is to pay people to do it. The second, demonstrated by the open source community, is to get volunteers to perform the same task. The Open Directory Project, an open source Yahoo competitor, is the result. But BitTorrent demonstrated a third way. There is no central database. Each user is a part of the searchable virtual database, and each user joined, makes the database better and bigger, simply by joining. There is a fourth way too. You sit down and collect data for ten years. In the end you will have your database, totally out of date, and useless.
One of the key lessons of the Web 2.0 era is this: Users add value. But only a small percentage of users will go to the trouble of adding value to your application via explicit means. People want more to get than to give. Therefore, Web 2.0 companies should go for a programming style that accumulates user data and building value as a side effect of ordinary use of the application. As noted above, they build systems that get better the more people use them. The only problem with that is that you would need really many people for your site to become famous.
To start a web 2.0 site is like to start a popgroup. You begin in a basement or a garage, perhaps with two fans, who are your friends. It depends more on how you handle your fans, than on your warez, that you will have more fans or not. As you carry on to the community center and higher, you got more and more fans who are spreading their love to the masses, creating more fans, and so on. But if there are no fans, there is no success; you stay in your garage.
We can say that a link is an instruction that connects one part of something with another. Like when your boss say that you got the kick. What's a hyperlink then? When your boss actually kicks you? No. When he points to the door. Hyperlink began its career in hypertext, as a word, phrase, or image that you could click on to jump to a new section within the current document. Nowadays you can jump to any such element on the whole web - if you have the hyperlink.
Hyperlinking is the foundation of the web. As users add new content, and new sites, it is bound to the structure of the web by other users discovering the content and linking to it. Much as synapses form in the brain, with associations becoming stronger through repetition or intensity, the web of connections grows organically as an output of the collective activity of all web users.
 |
We have mentioned already that Google's search is more a search of a catalog for pointers. Yahoo, the first great internet success story, was born as a catalog, or directory of links, a compilation of the best work of thousands, then millions of web users. One of the definitions of the word "yahoo", is a person who is not really intelligent, or interested in culture. One of the legendary questions at Yahoo Answers is "what is the countrey canada all about?" You can think that this worthless, but no. This questioner single-handedly got thousands of new visitors for the site, who would check out that his question was real. |
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We have already written much about Google. It's breakthrough in search, which quickly made it the undisputed search market leader, was PageRank, a method of using the link structure of the web rather than just the characteristics of documents to provide better search results. Google is so ubiquitous nowadays that sometimes you feel, sitting on the toilet bowl, that they are watching you from bellow, collecting data. |
|
eBay's product is the collective activity of all its users; like the web itself, eBay grows organically in response to user activity, and the company's role is as an administrator of a context in which user activity can happen. What's more, eBay's competitive advantage comes almost entirely from the critical mass of buyers and sellers, which makes any new start-up offering similar services drastically less attractive. Aside from that buyers say that half of the sellers are swindlers, and sellers stating that half of the buyers are swindlers, it's an institution nowadays. |
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Amazon demonstrates that by consistent company effort and creativity it is possible to overlay such a traditional business model with the use of collective intelligence. Amazon sells the same products as competitors such as barnesandnoble.com, and they receive the same product descriptions, cover images, and editorial content from their vendors. But Amazon has made a break-through of user engagement. They have an order of magnitude more user activities in many ways on virtually every page--and even more importantly, they use user activity to produce better search results. Other sites try to copy everything, but they can come only second.People have faith in it, and they pay for it. |
| Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia based on the unlikely notion that an entry can be added by any web user, and edited by any other, is a radical experiment in trust, applying Eric Raymond's dictum (originally coined in the context of open source software) that "with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow," to content creation. Wikipedia is already in the top 100 websites, and many think it will be in the top ten before long. This is a true change in the dynamics of content creation. It's not the Encyclopedia Britannica, it's something different; it's about what people are interested in. For example, the article for the expression "sexual intercourse" is several thousand words long, and got 133 references and uncountable links. Just compare. |
| Sites like del.icio.us and Flickr, two companies that have received a great deal of attention of late, have pioneered a concept that some people call "folksonomy" (in contrast to taxonomy), a style of collaborative categorization of sites using freely chosen keywords, often referred to as tags. Tagging allows for the kind of multiple, overlapping associations that the brain itself uses, rather than rigid categories. In the canonical example, a Flickr photo of a puppy might be tagged both "puppy" and "cute"--allowing for retrieval along natural axes generated user activity. And a politician could be classified as thief, robber, felon, crook, or swindler. |
To sum up from Open Source to folksonomy, and anything between, there are many different approaches, and I'm sure new successful web companies will find their own new ways, to harness collective intelligence. But not with a rein.
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The key to competitive advantage in Internet applications is the extent to which users add their own data to that which you provide. Therefore: Don't restrict your "architecture of participation" to software development. Involve your users already in the software design level, both implicitly and explicitly in adding value to your application. This is completely against the traditional paradigm, when only trusted programmers had something to say about a company software. By many programmers this is completely against common sense.
So, the rule is, "Users Add Value." Any type of social networking is also shows this principle. Don't forget that only a small percentage of users would go to the trouble of adding value to your application. That means you have to build your platform on such a way, that the pure use of your platform will add value to your site. It's like having a store where the pure appearance of people gives you money. Boy, doesn't sound that weird..
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"Six Degrees of Separation" means the idea that every one of us is on average about six steps away from any other person on Earth, so that a "friend of a friend" proclamation can be made, to connect any two people in more or less six steps. It was coined in a short story called "Chains" by F. Karinthy in 1929, and made widely known by a play written by J. Guare, premiered in 1990. Many people thinks that would be hateful, because you could never meet new, interesting people. They should relax, as this goal hasn't been realized yet, and perhaps never will. But it's a good slogan.
On the web social networking began with the Internet bulletin boards, before even there was the World Wide Web protocol. You could set up some ads, later on even messages onto these boards by sending your text through the phone lines. It was also the beginning of phoney lines, calling in somebody else's name. You could download the table of contents, and then the things you were interested in, every step as a separate sending. The good, old times, happily over now. When the www protocol began spread as a wild fire, bulletin boards spread with it. Advertisement find other ways, the possibility to answer to someone's pasted opinion was inexorable. They had several names, like discussion list, discussion board, message boards, etc. Socialization began then seriously .
From this phenomenon several branches came into being: chatrooms, forums, blogs, and social network sites. All of them are managing user-generated contents. Today we can say that a chatroom is real-time written conversation, forums are usually about a theme, blogs are about a person or a company, and social network sites are about social relations. Social network sites are coming in many flavors, but outside the make-friends variety the most important is the social news sites. But they are all overlapping each other, just like most of the web 2.0 principles. We don't talk about chatrooms here, but if it especially suits your site, make one. For the usual company, a forum is a must, a blog is an
aspiration, and becoming a social network is a wishful dream.
"What have you done in your life?" asks God the newbee soul.
"Haven't you read my tweets?"
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A web forum is a site where people can get into conversations in the form of posted messages. A forum is hierarchical or tree-like in structure: it can contain a number of subforums, each of which may have several topics. Within a forum's topic, a conversation about a single theme is called a thread. It can be replied to by any people. Mostly, users have to register with the forum and then subsequently log in in order to post messages. An unregistered user of the site is commonly known as a guest or visitor. They don't have to log in order to read existing messages. Note, that sometimes the creativity run over for the forum managers, and they create so many levels of sub-themes, that most of them stays empty, and visitors wouldn't want to register. (Sometimes, greed, stupidity, bureaucracy, envy and whatever can also run over creativity at the forum managers.) The right way to threads is to create only as many levels as the threads absolutely need. It's also a solution to move upwards a specially successful thread.
Administrators
are the technical managers of forums. Forum conversations are managed by moderators,
who can usually rewrite or remove text and suspend or remove a user access to a forum.
So, the principle is, Make Easy-to-do User-to-user Relations Possible.
Let's see an example how a forum works.
HOW MANY FORUM MEMBERS DOES IT TAKE TO CHANGE A LIGHT BULB?
1 to change the light bulb and to post that the light bulb has been changed
14 to share similar experiences of changing light bulbs and how the light bulb could have been changed differently
7 to caution about the dangers of changing light bulbs
6 to argue over whether it's "lightbulb" or "light bulb" ...
another 6 to condemn those 6 as stupid
2 industry professionals to inform the group that the proper term is "lamp"
15 know-it-alls who claim they were in the industry, and that "lightbulb" is perfectly correct
19 to post that this forum is not about light bulbs and to please take this discussion to a light bulb forum
11 to defend the posting to this forum saying that we all use light bulbs and therefore the posts are relevant to this forum
36 to debate which method of changing light bulbs is superior, where to buy the best light bulbs, what brand of light bulbs work best for this technique and what brands are faulty
5 People to post pics of their own light bulbs
15 People to post "I can't see S$%^!" and their own light bulbs
7 to post URL's where one can see examples of different light bulbs
4 to post that the URL's were posted incorrectly and then post the corrected URL's
13 to link all posts to date, quote them in their entirety including all headers
and signatures, and add "Me too"
5 to post to the group that they will no longer post because they cannot handle the light bulb controversy
4 to say "didn't we go through this already a short time ago?"
13 to say "do a search on light bulbs before posting questions about light bulbs"
1 moderator to lock the light bulb thread
1 forum lurker to respond to the original post 6 months from now and start it all over again.
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Let's add to the "Forum" example above, that blogs and social network conversations are very similar.
What's the importance of a blog? A site with a successful blog is usually a successful site. (Blog is shorthand for weB log.)
Now let's begin at the beginning. One of the most important features of the Web 2.0 era is the rise of blogging. Personal home pages have been around since the early days of the web, and the personal diary and daily opinion column around much longer than that, so just what is the fuss all about?
At its most basic, a blog is just a personal home page in diary format. But it can contain many other things.
* usually anyone can comment your blog, that is, anyone is free to partake
* you can put links in your blog to anywhere in the web, and others can put links from anywhere to your blog
>> see "Permalinks" bellow
* can be subscribed to in RSS format >> see "Really Simple Syndication"
* connect and tie together collective intelligence >> "Collective Intelligence"
* the feeling of >> Control Your Destiny (see bellow)
An answer to "Why Do I Love Blogging?" - Because you get to do some interesting things, and you get to meet some amazing people.
Well, let's set up a blog to debate that…
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REALLY SIMPLE SYNDICATION = RSS
One of the things that have made a difference is a technology called RSS. It allows someone to link not just to a page, but to subscribe to it, with notification every time that page changes. Now, of course, "dynamic websites" (i.e., database-backed sites with dynamically generated content) replaced static web pages well over ten years ago. What's dynamic about the live web are not just the pages, but also the links. A link to a weblog is expected to point to a continuously changing page, with "permalinks" for any individual entry, and notification for each change. An RSS feed is thus a much stronger link than say, a bookmark or a link to a single page. It's almost as big a difference than getting the picture of a left-straight, or getting a left-straight.
RSS is now being used to push not just notices of new blog entries, but also all kinds of data updates, including stock quotes, weather data, and photo availability. This use is actually a return to one of its roots: RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's "Really Simple Syndication" technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's "Rich Site Summary", which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows. Netscape lost interest, and the technology was carried forward by blogging pioneer Userland, Winer's company. In the current crop of applications, we see, though, the heritage of both parents. People generally care about this distinction as much as about the cable type of their web connection. They simply just want to get their favorite blog.
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PERMALINKS
But RSS is only part of what makes a weblog different from an ordinary web page. It may seem like a trivial piece of functionality now, but permanent links turned weblogs from an ease-of-publishing phenomenon into a conversational mess of overlapping communities. For the first time it became relatively easy to gesture directly at a highly specific post on someone else's site and talk about it. Discussion emerged. Chat emerged. And - as a result - friendships emerged. The permalink was the first - and most successful - attempt to build bridges between weblogs. The philosophy
Quantum Mechanics, or of Dirk Gently's Detective Agency, about the interconnectedness of all things, is now about 100% true in the web.
In many ways, the combination of RSS and permalinks adds many of the features of NNTP, the Network News Protocol of the Usenet, onto HTTP, the web protocol. The "blogosphere" can be thought of as a new, peer-to-peer equivalent to Usenet and bulletin boards, the conversational watering holes of the early Internet. Nowadays the Usenet is like a survival of old times, a living dinosaur. Not only can people subscribe to each others' sites, and easily link to individual comments on a page, but also, via a mechanism known as trackbacks, they can see when anyone else links to their pages, and can respond, either with reciprocal links, or by adding comments. Interestingly, two-way links were the goal of early hypertext systems like Xanadu.
Well, the real Xanadu is only a myth and now the web one is also just that.
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COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE
If an essential part of Web 2.0 is to connect and tie together collective intelligence, turning the web into a kind of global brain, the blogosphere is the equivalent of constant mental chatter in the forebrain, the voice we all hear in our heads. There is not much meaning with thoughts running wild, but there are a lot of things to pick up at will.
The blogosphere has begun to have a powerful effect on the
web. First, because search engines use link structure to help predict useful pages, bloggers, as the most prolific and timely linkers, have a disproportionate role in shaping search engine results. Second, because the blogging community is so highly self-referential, bloggers paying attention to other bloggers
magnifies their visibility and power. Poor forum people never will get the same
attention, even if their opinion is ten times more important or interesting.
While mainstream media may see individual blogs as competitors, in fact, the competition is with the blogosphere as a whole. This is not just a competition between sites, but a competition between business models. The world of Web 2.0 is also a world in which the audience, not a few people in a back room, decides what's important. You can also see some successful bloggers snatched up by media,
as well as successful media people starting blogs. Blogosphere floods the media, like water floods a town.
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CONTROL YOUR DESTINY
Many people feel in most of the scenes of their life they don't have the right even to air their opinions. In their jobs there are the bosses and bossy colleagues, in private life there are their bossy spouses, relatives and relations, but in a blog they have their say.
Because usually to join a blog you need only an email address, which you can get anonymously, people
feel free.
So, in a big measure, blogging is so successful because people feel they can finally partake. Some hard-core bloggers are participating in more than hundred blogs - daily. They feel they performed, they were partaking, they influenced the world. And in many cases, they do. There are blogs followed by tens of thousands people. Blogging is partaking and influence. Great bloggers feel they can control their destiny, and in many cases, they truly have a say in decisions. Blogging is also a good example to the rule, "Users Add Value."
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The simplest definition of online social network is that it's a website that functions as meeting place, on the first hand, with real-life friends, on the other hand, with every human being on the Earth, who joined the site. Social networks are made firstly for social contacts, but they also try to integrate into themselves every possible free web services, from search to email, but especially the social functions, like personal pages, forums, blogging and any conceivable connection methods. The most important thing is making friends, and communication with them, through all the possible means.
Many people make a race of how many friends they can collect. Other people collect stamps.
In the beginning many of these online community were based on members who had common interests in hobbies, work, studies, religion, or politics. After you joined you could begin to socialize with the other members, like reading their profile pages, making notes to their common space, an if they allowed it, you could contact them. You could also make friends on the basis of their web descriptions, images and utterances. You could be friends with people around the
world, with any tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor - who can connect to the web.
Nowadays almost all social network sites want to allow the membership for anyone, but with a very little success. It's like the "www" protocol of the net: It was so successful, that all other protocols dropped behind with several orders of magnitude. Many people think that www is the Internet protocol, although it's only the web protocol. All those other protocols from gopher to telnet are alive and used in the Internet. This kind of success was also made by Facebook, as a social network site. In a websearch, I found 153 bigger social networks, most of them nobody ever heard of.
It's like a Marathon - there is the winner, after him the vanguard, and then
there are people finishing their run six hours later.
Now we will look at the development of online social network sites, just to see what went wrong. In 1997 SixDegrees.com users could create profiles, list their online friends and, later on, go through the Friends lists. Member profiles were on most major dating sites and many community sites. AIM and ICQ buddy lists had lists of Friends, although, quite useless, as the listed Friends were not visible to others. Classmates.com had a feature for people to affiliate with their high school or college and try to find others who were also affiliated, but users could not create profiles or list friends until years later.
SixDegrees was the first to combine these features. But it didn't succeed as a business, that is, there were not enough advertisers. So, in 2000 it closed. By some people who used the service, the error lied in the fact that after accepting friends, there was not much to do. Facebook
makes sure there are lots of activities within. Like take away the dung from your virtual farm. Is it meaningless for some,
and very important for others.
Meanwhile none of the other similar sites made any impact. In the early 2000+ years, several new ones tried to succeed. Funnily, the people who made Friendster, LinkedIn, Ryze, Tribe, were closely connected both professionally and personally. By their own account, they thought they could help each other without competing. Funny, like opening the same kind of shop in one street. Finally, Friendster became the success story, but with a bad end, LinkedIn turned into a business service, Ryze never became truly popular, while Tribe got an obsessive, but small
camp, like the fan club of an underground music group.
So, let's see Friendster. Launched in 2002, it should have become what Facebook is today. Friendster allowed for help friends-of-friends meet, thinking that they would make more suitable romantic partners than strangers. With the fast growth of the web, the site as a business couldn't grow with it, needing both software and server parks. On the other site, the opening to the common, workers met bosses, husbands met their wives, and so on, which many users couldn't handle. As top of the cake, Friendster tried to restrict its most dedicated users, because they used up too much of the resources. From the business point of view, Friendster didn't have enough venture capital.
From the common-sense point of view they were !@#$%^&*.
The first user trick the company couldn't handle was that some people began massively collect friends. (An everyday event in Facebook.) The other thing was fake profiles in the image of fictional characters, concepts, and the likes. These "Fakesters" annoyed the company so much, that they banished fake profiles and deleted the "most popular" feature. Although few people created Fakesters, many more enjoyed them for entertainment or using functional Fakesters like "Brown University" to find people they knew. The limited minds in the company couldn't get
the idea that users make the net. This was the typical example of people doing something different than the company thought. Instead of embracing it, they killed it. And with it, they
made a suicide.
The active deletion of Fakesters together with authentic users who put up fantasy images made the users feel that the site is not made for them. They left in flocks, seeking other places. MySpace was begun in 2003 to compete with sites like Friendster, Xanga, and so on, by one of the founders. They especially wanted to attract the unsatisfied Friendster users, especially after rumors that Friendster would adopt a
fee-based system. Today they are the second after Facebook. All right, long after Facebook.
As Facebook was already in the Times magazine, there is a film, etc; I don't see a need to go into its detailed history. What we can see from the outside, are the following concepts:
* to open gradually, in many steps, to the masses, from membership for students in some US colleges only, to every human being on the Earth
* to integrate every possible web services, free, from search to email, from free images and videos to social games
* continuously creating new ways to make friends and communicate with them - relations, relations, relations…
Many people would not only make friends, but also do friends, but that can't
be made at Facebook. It could be done for example in the Adult Sections of
Second Life.
And this relations thing Facebook makes best of all such sites, is the most prominent example of the last mentioned principle: Make Easy-to-do User-to-user Relations Possible.
That means the company have to work continuously, to make its relational services better, and trying to implement new kind of relations and communication methods.
For example, clicking on the "Like" button is the most simple message
you can send to someone about his or her post. That doesn't need much
intelligence, and, anyway, high-intelligence work is fun only for the eggheads,
like me.
Anyway, when you arrive home after a long
working day, you want a drink, and watch the TV, not doing crosswords.
Social news sites are social network sites with news submission and a voting system. There is a wild competition about who can find and link the most intriguing news first. The members are continuously voting. The repeated winners gain great respect, getting a fan club of out of their followers.
This is beyond my horizon, like American football. The news they are competing
with, could be any event, even a new site, but company press releases hardly ever are accepted.
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There is then no way to build up a successful website, with social networking in mind? Absolutely wrong.
We have five basic senses, sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. Up to date, sight and hearing could be employed by the web services.
By websearch, the most popular site for pictures is tumblr.com, for videos there is utube.com and for popular music
itune.com. I don't know which is the most popular in sex-site, as a friend said
they are all popular.
There is one common thing, from the programming point of view; they are all databases, with possibility of sharing, as a touch of social networking. Although the first places for general pictures, videos, and popmusic are already taken, there are place for companies, which can create their own
niches. They have to be databases with some social networking possibilities.
Twitter is another example of specialist social networking on a totally specialized way, for totally special brains.
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Every significant Internet application to date has been backed by a specialized database: Google's web crawl, Yahoo's directory (and web crawl), Amazon's database of products, eBay's database of products and sellers, MapQuest's map databases, Napster's distributed song database.
You can say, "SQL is the new HTML." Database management is a core competency of Web 2.0 companies, so much so that we have sometimes referred to these applications as "infoware" rather than merely software. This word was coined long ago, and used then forgotten several times. We take it forward again, because sometime it should
stuck. I mean shop clerk became sales assistant, so software can also become
infoware.
Well, all this web-database use leads to a key question: Who owns the data? The owners, obviously, would say the unschooled mind.
Hah! We, computer geeks, know it better. Let's rephrase the question. Who can profit from a database?
We can investigate an example.
Look at the copyright notices at the main free map services, maps.yahoo.com, maps.msn.com, or maps.google.com, and you'll see the line "Maps copyright NavTeq, TeleAtlas," or with the new satellite imagery services, "Images copyright Digital Globe." These companies made
large investments in their databases (NavTeq alone reportedly invested $750 million to build their database of street addresses and directions. Digital Globe spent $500 million to launch their
own satellite to improve on government-supplied imagery.) NavTeq has gone so far as to imitate Intel's familiar Intel Inside logo: Cars with navigation systems bear the imprint, "NavTeq Onboard."
Compared with the annual income of a New York criminal clan - around $1,000
million - it's not much. Compared with the minimum wage in London - about
$1,000 a month - it's astronomical. So, we say after Einstein, everything
is relative.
Data is indeed the Intel Inside of these applications, a sole source component in systems whose software infrastructure is largely open source or otherwise commodified. Like BitTorrent commodified
electronic creations. The only thing more popular would be to commodify Federal Reserve.
The now hotly contested web-mapping arena demonstrates how a failure to understand the importance of owning an application's core data will eventually undercut its competitive position. MapQuest pioneered the web-mapping category in 1995. They thought they're done. When Yahoo, and then Microsoft, and most recently Google, decided to enter the market, they were easily able to offer a competing application simply by licensing the same data.
And the best will be that who will have the most extras, and who will be the
most social. But not most socialist.
Imagine if MapQuest had done the same
thing as Google, harnessing their users to annotate maps and directions, adding layers of value. It would have been much more difficult for competitors to enter the market just by licensing the base data.
I know, I know, twenty/twenty hindsight. If Grandmother would have got wheels, she could have been a car.
Nevertheless, the lack of success depended on the open mind and inventiveness of
the company, like Friendster.
So, Data is the Next <Intel Inside.>>
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The race is on to own certain classes of core data: location, identity, calendaring of public events, product identifiers and whatever has public interest. As people are fascinated by sex and violence, I'm sure there will be some database about them, though I have no idea what exactly. And this is just the point, because the specific niche is what counts. In many cases, where there is significant cost to create the data, there may be an opportunity for an Intel Inside style play, with a single source for the data. In others, the winner will be the company that first reaches critical mass via user aggregation, and turns that aggregated data into a system service. If this will become a general trend, we'll have buns with the logo: "Sugar Inside."
A further point must be noted with regard to data, and that is user concerns about privacy and users' rights to their own data. In many of the early web applications, copyright is only loosely enforced. For example, Amazon lays claim to any reviews submitted to the site, but in the absence of enforcement, people may repost the same review elsewhere. However, as companies begin to realize that control over data may be their chief source of competitive advantage, we may see heightened attempts at control. This is the first step in the way of greed, fascism, and more web billionaires.
Much
as the rise of licensed software led to the Free
Software movement, we expect the rise of
At bottom, Google requires a competency that Netscape never needed: database management. Google isn't just a collection of software tools; it's a specialized database. Without the data, the tools are useless; without the software, the data is unmanageable. Software licensing and control over APIs--the lever of power in the previous era--is irrelevant because the software never need be distributed but only performed, and also because without the ability to collect and manage the data, the software is of little use. In fact, the value of the software is proportional to the scale and dynamism of the data it helps to manage. Data is the new god of the greedy.
That is, The
Value Of The Software Depends On The Data It Manages.
As we can see, applications are increasingly data-driven.
Therefore: For competitive advantage, seek to own a unique, hard-to-recreate
source of data. Combine that with another principle, mentioned above: Users Add
Value. The key to competitive advantage in Internet applications is the
extent to which users add their own data to that which you provide. Involve your
users both implicitly and explicitly in adding value to your application.
Hard-to-recreate basic data with user-created additional data means a leading
edge.
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Another key web 2.0 principle, which we call "Innovation In Assembly."
When commodity components are abundant, you can create value simply by assembling them in a novel or effective way. Take sundae. Ice cream with a hot sauce. It would have sounded crazy until someone invented it. We can call them simply combined services. The new word for this kind of new services is "mashup." As good as any other unlucky expression we are stuck with in this computer-nerd word.
The PC revolution provided many opportunities for innovation in assembly of commodity hardware, with companies like Dell, a an assemling company, winning its market by a smart choice of components, and by that defeating companies whose business model required innovation in product development.
Now, Web 2.0 will provide opportunities for companies to beat the competition by getting better at harnessing and integrating services provided by others.
Like the merchant classes, or any other in-betweeners, they rake in an order of
magnitude more money then the actual producers. By the inventors, that's also the advantage of being a
parasite.
For example, the recent introduction of Google Maps shows the competition between application vendors and their data suppliers. Google's lightweight programming model has led to the creation of numerous value-added services in the form of mashups
that link Google Maps with other internet-accessible data sources. "housingmaps.com" combines Google Maps with Craigslist apartment rental and home purchase data to create an interactive housing search tool, is
an example of such combined services. Combine a car with a Jacuzzi, and you get a super-limousine.
For whom? You find it out.
At present, these combined services are mostly innovative experiments, done by hackers. But entrepreneurial activity follows close behind. And already, one can see that for at least one class of developer, Google has taken the role of data source away from Navteq and inserted themselves as a favored intermediary. We expect to see battles between data suppliers and application vendors in the next few years, as both realize just how important certain classes of data will become as building blocks for Web 2.0 applications. You only need imagination. Make a new world.
Venture capitalist Paul Kedrosky writes: "The key is to find the actionable investments where you disagree with the consensus". In other words, this is
one definition of creativity. It's interesting to see how each Web 2.0 facet involves disagreeing with the consensus: everyone was emphasizing keeping data private, Flickr, Napster, etc make it public. It's not just disagreeing to be disagreeable, it's disagreeing where you can build something out of the differences. Flickr builds communities, Napster built breadth of collection.
Another way to look at Web 2.0 phenomenons is that the successful companies all give up something expensive but considered critical to get something valuable for free that was once expensive. For example, Wikipedia gives up central editorial control - which was unheard of before - in return for speed and breadth. Napster gave up on the idea of "the catalog" and got breadth. Amazon gave up on the idea of having a physical storefront but got to serve the entire world. But this leads us to the conscious use of creative thinking, which is not the topic of this article. The gist of it is, you should be crazy, but don't be mad.
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As noted above in the discussion of Google vs. Netscape, when devices and programs are connected to the Internet, applications are no longer software artifacts, they are ongoing services. Therefore: Don't package up new features into monolithic releases. Mammoths died out. Mammoth-mentality companies go bankrupt, or shrink into insignificance. Instead add new features on a regular basis as part of the normal user experience. Engage your users as real-time testers, and instrument the service so that you know how people use the new features. That means the state of The Perpetual Beta. This fact leads to a number of fundamental changes in the business model of such a company:
Operations Must Become A Core Competency. Google's or Yahoo!'s expertise in product development must be matched by an expertise in daily operations. So fundamental is the shift from software as artifact to software as service that the software will cease to perform unless it is maintained on a daily basis. It's like motorcycle maintenance. Google and Yahoo must continuously crawl the web and update its indices, filter out link spam and other attempts to influence its results, respond to hundreds of millions of user queries, etc. Like the mouse of a mansion, must be up to speed in a lot of things.
It's no accident that Google's system administration, networking, and load balancing techniques seem more closely guarded secrets than their search algorithms. Google's success at automating these processes is a key part of their cost advantage over competitors. There are always new goals in industrial espionage.
Users Must Be Treated As Co-Developers, similar to the open source development practices. (Even if the software in question won't ever be released.) The open source dictum, "release early and release often" in fact has morphed into an even more radical position, "the perpetual beta," in which the product is developed in the open, with new features updated from monthly, up to hourly or minutely basis. It's no accident that services such as Gmail, Google Maps, Flickr, del.icio.us, and the like may be expected to bear a "Beta" logo for years at a time. Or forever, like a city.
Real time monitoring of user behavior to see just which new features are used, and how they are used, thus becomes another required core competency. A web developer at a major online service remarked: "We put up two or three new features on some part of the site every day, and if users don't adopt them, we take them down. If they like them, we roll them out to the entire site." Experiment like a cautious daredevil.
Cal Henderson, the lead developer of Flickr, recently revealed that they deploy new builds up to every half hour. This is clearly a radically different development model. While not all web applications are developed in as extreme a style as Flickr, almost all web applications have a development cycle that is radically unlike anything from the PC or client-server era.
It is for this reason that a recent ZDnet editorial concluded that Microsoft wouldn't be able to beat Google: "Microsoft's business model depends on everyone upgrading their computing environment every two to three years. Google's depends on everyone exploring what's new in their computing environment every day." - What's the meaning of that? Well, who likes Microsoft? And who likes Google?
Cooperate, Don't Control - Web 2.0 applications are built of a network of cooperating data services. Therefore: Offer web services interfaces and content syndication, and re-use the data services of others. Support lightweight programming models that allow for loosely-coupled systems. While Microsoft has demonstrated an ability to learn from and ultimately best its competition, there's no question that this time, the competition will require Microsoft, and by extension, every other existing traditional software company, to become a deeply different kind of company. Like changing from a honey-liking bear into a honey-making hive of bees.
In Web 2.0 Microsoft would have been gone already, if the company would need to live on their Web 2.0 services. They are here still only because they sell their Windows OS. Native Web 2.0 companies enjoy a natural advantage, as they don't have old patterns - and corresponding business models and revenue sources- to shed. This is evolution in the Darwinistic sense: that who can't adapt, will be gone.
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Once the idea of web services became trendy, large companies jumped into the fray with a complex web services stack designed to create highly reliable programming environments for distributed applications. [This sentence was for academic readers.]
Simply, paid site-access services in the
Let's look at another Web 2.0 company. Amazon.com's web services are provided in two forms: one holding fast to the formalisms of the SOAP - don't try to wash with it, it means Simple Object Access Protocol - web services stack, the other simply providing XML data over HTTP, in a lightweight approach sometimes referred to as REST (Representational State Transfer). While high value B2B connections (like those between Amazon and retail partners like ToysRUs) use the SOAP stack, Amazon reports that 95% of the usage is of the lightweight REST service. Relax, cool, down, take it easy - even in your Web 2.0 software development.
This same quest for simplicity can be seen in other "organic" web services. Google's recent release of Google Maps is a case in point. While experimenting with any of the formal vendor-supported web services required a formal contract between the parties, the way Google Maps was implemented left the data for the taking, and hackers soon found ways to creatively re-use that data. Like a bank safe open to the public. Serve all.
There are several significant lessons here:
Support lightweight programming models that allow for loosely coupled systems. This is another side of a principle already mentioned: Innovation In Assembly. That means the complexity of the corporate-sponsored web services stack is designed to enable tight coupling. While this is necessary in many cases, many of the most interesting applications can indeed remain loosely coupled, and even fragile. The Web 2.0 mindset is very different from the traditional IT mindset, like the difference between the mindset of an accidental killer and a serial killer.
Think syndication, not coordination. This is also a new expression of an above-mentioned principle, Cooperate, Don't Control. Simple web services, like RSS and REST-based web services, are about syndicating data outwards, not controlling what happens when it gets to the other end of the connection. This idea is fundamental to the Internet itself, a reflection of what is known as the end-to-end principle. Try to connect the two ends of a cane and see what happens.
Design For "Hackability" And Remixability. Systems like the original web, RSS, and AJAX all have this in common: the barriers to re-use are extremely low. Much of the useful software is actually open source, but even when it isn't, there is little in the way of intellectual property protection. The web browser's "View Source" option made it possible for any user to copy any other user's web page; RSS was designed to empower the user to view the content he or she wants, when it's wanted, not at the behest of the information provider; the most successful web services are those that have been easiest to take in new directions unimagined by their creators. Like when your corner deli transforms itself partly into a post office, and after getting some meat and sauce you also get a parcel.
Intellectual property protection limits re-use and prevents experimentation. Therefore: When benefits come from collective adoption, not private restriction, make sure that barriers to adoption are low. Follow existing standards, and use licenses with as few restrictions as possible. Design for "hackability" and "remixability." The phrase "some rights reserved," which was popularized by the Creative Commons to contrast with the more typical "all rights reserved," is a useful guidepost. This trend galls everyone who has an intellectual property, but then weather also galls everyone, and resists to be controlled.
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Offer your Software As A Service on the web. Your software will become the perpetual beta.
As we already mentioned, "Software As A Service" means paid site-access services on which a user can drive software as if it would be on her own computer. Nowadays that means for programmers the use of DHTML, JavaScript and the likes. The idea was implemented long ago in computer terms. In my opinion, the first in this was IBM, in the era of the mainframe computers, strictly for big companies, because others couldn't afford that.
When I was living in Singapore, I learned that every
interesting commodity has three appearances. For example there was real Rolex, real-false
The progress into Web 2.0 means an unprecedented period of user interface innovation, as web developers are finally able to build web applications as rich as local PC-based applications. We expect to see many new web applications over the next few years, both truly novel applications, and rich web re-implementations of PC applications. Every platform change to date has also created opportunities for a leadership change.
By field biologists, if you shoot the leader in a wild goose formation, the rest gets totally disoriented. But when you shoot the leader in a wolf group, there is always someone who takes up the leadership immediately. This is what web business like.
A Web 2.0 word processor would support wiki-style
collaborative editing, not just standalone documents. But it would also support
the rich formatting we've come to expect in PC-based word processors. Writely
is a good example. Google Docs is made out of Writely plus a Google spreadsheet.
It's using the Software As A Service
Salesforce.com demonstrates how the web can be used to deliver software as a service, in enterprise scale applications such as CRM. This is the single most important software in Web 2.0 company management, integrating all user interactions with clients, customers and sales prospects. Good businessmen knew already thousands of years ago, that their most important commodity is the clients. Like greed, it didn't change.
The competitive opportunity for newbie companies is to fully embrace the potential of Web 2.0. Companies that succeed will create applications that learn from their users, using an architecture of participation to build a commanding advantage not just in the software interface, but in the richness of the shared data. The heat is on.
For most businessmen the name SAP would be more known than Salesforce, especially that they are around for several decades. It started as a German company "Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung" that is "System Analysis and Program Development" - a totally and generally usable name, saying very little. The meaning was to run all aspects of a company by software. What is important is to see that today, after for about thirty years running their programs from company mainframes to servers and everything between, they are now also offer their services as Software As A Service on the web. So they have now a chance to become a true Web 2.0 company.
In the beginning there were very few
species which conquered the land. Most of them stayed in the tepid water.
Nowadays all eco-niches are filled. But you can have your niche in
SAP's Business Suit contains about all the modules a company-client needs:
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Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) - the 3-tier architecture: database, application server and client |
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Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – helps companies acquire and retain customers, gain marketing and customer insight |
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Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) – helps manufacturers with product-related information |
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Supply Chain Management (SCM) – helps companies with the process of resourcing its manufacturing and service processes |
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Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) – enables companies to procure from suppliers |
Well, it doesn't contain the module, how to create and maintain Web 2.0 sites. But we can do just that...
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One other feature of Web 2.0 that deserves mention is the fact that it's no longer limited to the PC platform. In his parting advice to Microsoft, long time Microsoft developer Dave Stutz pointed out that "Useful software written above the level of the single device will command high margins for a long time to come." He could have advised a crocodile to go over flying.
As we've discussed, the development of the web as platform extends this idea to synthetic applications composed of services provided by multiple computers. But as with many areas of Web 2.0, where the "2.0-ish-ness" is not something new, but rather a fuller realization of the true potential of the web platform, this phrase gives us a key insight into how to design applications and services for the new platform. The steam-engine designers were totally baffled of the Otto engine. New inventors loved it. So was the automobile born.
We can also say it on another way: Hardware Defines Software. It's a decades old principle, even if it was meant first only for computers. What it means today, is that companies should implement their software to any kind of information-bearer hardware, like handheld PCs, palmtops, smartphones, iPad, iPod and whatever gimmicks will come in the future. The gimmick will define how you can implement your software onto it. We can see that phone producers make their phones more computer-like, while handheld computer producers makes their machines capable of more forms of wireless communication. It's like the race between armour and cannon. Finally the two ends met in the construction of the tank. I mean not a septic tank, but an armoured, cannoned fighting vehicle.
The PC is no longer the only access device for Internet applications, and applications that are limited to a single device are less valuable than those that are connected. Therefore: Design your application to every gimmick you can. Ultimately, in a cone of ice cream, in a roll of toilet paper, whatever.
To date, iTunes is the best exemple of this principle. This application seamlessly reaches from the handheld device to a massive web back-end, with the PC acting as a local cache and control station. There have been many previous attempts to bring web content to portable devices, but the iPod/iTunes combination is one of the first such applications designed from the ground up to span multiple devices.
This is one of the areas of Web 2.0 where we expect to see some of the greatest change, as more and more devices are connected to the new platform. What applications become possible when our phones and our cars are not consuming data but reporting it? Real time traffic monitoring, flash mobs, and citizen journalism, and a total loss of privacy are only a few of the early warning signs of the capabilities of the new platform.
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In his book, A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander prescribes a format for the concise description of the solution to architectural problems. He writes: "Each pattern describes a problem that occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice. That's also true about websites. Or sex.
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The web is a platform environment -
So design the
software on that. |
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A platform beats an application every time - Turn your site into a platform. |
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Users make the web - Get as many users you can. |
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The long tail: reach out to the entire web - No fish is too small. |
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A Web 2.0 Service Should Get Better The More People Use It - Quantity changes quality. |
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Users Add Value - Harness collective intelligence. |
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Make Easy-to-do User-to-user Relations Possible - Program for that. |
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Data is the Next <Intel Inside>> - Get , create or rent a special database. |
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The Value Of The Software
Depends On The Data It Manages
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Enhance and develop your database. |
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Innovation In Assembly - or Use Loosely Coupled Systems |
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The Perpetual Beta - End of the software release cycle. |
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Operations Must Become A Core
Competency
- Engineer your organizing. |
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Users Must Be Treated As
Co-Developers -
Let people develop your software. |
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Cooperate, Don't Control
- or Think Syndication, Not Coordination |
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Design For Remixability - or Some Rights Reserved |
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Software As A Service - Made possible by the Perpetual Beta. |
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Software Above the Level of a Single Device -- Hardware Defines Software |
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Original base article: http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html by Tim O'Reilly 09/30/2005
< this service is temporarily discontinued >>
We say hello to all our old clients and site users, as well as any new
one. Yet again we left our clogged up, run down, and on many ways ruined old
website and began from square one. We can only hope that every quarreler, bore and spammer
will stay away, while all funny, witty and interesting people, who has something
new to say about Web 2.0, will find us.
Don't forget that not all services can be turned into Web 2.0 with the same
ease, and the more far away you are from web 2.0 the more your company have to work on it. We can only make you a start. You won't get ahead of amazon or google the day after tomorrow.
Get real. Only, perhaps,
WE |
SPEAK |
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| English | German | Hungarian | Swedish |
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| Deutsch | Magyar | Svenska | |
WE |
WORK |
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| England | Germany | Hungary | Sweden |
The transformation of a company from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 is teamwork. We use network diagram analysis, CPM1 or PERT2, but we don't use CCPM3, which we regard as a scientific garbage, like the Flat Earth concept. Count also with the need of Optimizations of your site and company.
1CPM=Critical Path Method * 2PERT=Program Evaluation and Review Technique * 3CCPM=Critical Chain Project Management
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FIXED |
MEMBERS |
| Erik Cornelius Heber | John Thomas Barefield |
He was with the 'net since there were just a couple of universities connected. |
He worked with the Internet for about twenty years. |
| team leader, organizer, idea man, (copy)writer, SEO, troubleshooter, | team leader, second-in-command, idea man, (copy)writer, SEO, corporate expert |
| TEMPORARY MEMBERS/ Web Experts | TEMPORARY MEMBERS/ Company Experts |
| copywriters | accountants |
| web artists | economists |
| webmasters | human resources experts |
| web programmers | personal assistants |
| web writers | public relations experts |
| SEOs |
email: ech@web2do.biz
I let it here mostly for B2B email but if you want to contact me for any reason, just use it. We may dump all non-business, spam and ads without reading. Actually we can't imagine that you have any other reason to contact us but business, but we could get curious why do you do it at all.
How can we decide if it's not business related email if we don't read it? Well... we can always guess. Anyway, if the on-duty email checker person is in a mean mood, like (s)he haven't gotten laid for a while, (s)he has not enough money to buy something, or (s)he has been hurt by a third party, (s)he could just dump everything. So, if you wouldn't get an answer, try again.
Because the service is discontinued, I deleted this part. If you badly need my services, you have to negotiate.
Just returning from Germany 6 of the 7 team members made a mutiny. They decided to retire, partly because they thought they have enough money for life, partly to be together with their families.
Then John made a non-act: he simply didn't validated his passport. His ID ran out for months already, so he was effectively hindered from travel. This clearly had shown that he was also fed up.
True, I was also fed up of the continuous haggling with the companies, to extract the fee. Most companies were not swindlers, they just were totally down since the break-out of the international crisis in 2008. But nevertheless, that meant a special fight to get out at least the money for the team.
I've tried to ask for each day's fee for advance, but no go. Bigger companies usually said they have their financial procedures to watch, while smaller companies usually thought that WE are the swindlers.
But I haven't lost interest. This is why I put up this new site with the blog. If you are tough enough, have time, brains and perseverance, you can do web 2.0 yourself. Good luck.
Nevertheless, if you want a consultation with Erik, you have to pay in advance... :-)
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