Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Welcome to Web 2.0

In What Is Web 2.0 O’Reilly Media President and CEO Tim O'Reilly explains what it means Web 2.0. Basically, it's based on a set of core principles:
  1. The web as platform
  2. Harnessing Collective Intelligence
  3. Data is the Next Intel Inside
  4. End of the Software Release Cycle
  5. Lightweight Programming Models
  6. Software Above the Level of a Single Device
  7. Rich User Experiences
P1. The web as platform. Explained by example:
  • Netscape vs. Google. Netscape framed the web as platform in terms of the old software paradigm: their flagship product was the web browser, a desktop application, and their strategy was to use their dominance in the browser market to establish a market for high-priced server products. 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. At bottom, Google requires a competency that Netscape never needed: database management. In fact, to Tim, the value of the software is proportional to the scale and dynamism of the data it helps to manage. 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, Napster, and yes, DoubleClick and Akamai.
  • DoubleClick vs. Overture and AdSense. DoubleClick was ultimately limited by its business model. It bought into the '90s notion that the web was about publishing, not participation; Overture and Google's success came from an understanding of what Chris Anderson refers to as the long tail, the collective power of the small sites that make up the bulk of the web's content. DoubleClick's offerings require a formal sales contract, limiting their market to the few thousand largest websites. The Web 2.0 lesson: leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head.
  • Akamai vs. BitTorrent. BitTorrent, like other pioneers in the P2P movement, takes a radical approach to internet decentralization. Every client is also a server; BitTorrent thus demonstrates a key Web 2.0 principle: the service automatically gets better the more people use it.
P2. Harnessing Collective Intelligence.
Explained by success story.
  • 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 enabler of a context in which that user activity can happen.
  • 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 science of user engagement.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Even much of the infrastructure of the web--including the Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl, PHP, or Python code involved in most web servers--relies on the peer-production methods of open source, in themselves an instance of collective, net-enabled intelligence. There are more than 100,000 open source software projects listed on SourceForge.net.
  • Blogging and the Wisdom of Crowds. At this regard, tom remembers that RSS allows someone to link not just to a page, but to subscribe to it, with notification every time that page changes. Skrenta calls this the incremental web. Others call it the live web.
P3. Data is the Next Intel Inside. The race is on to own certain classes of core data: location, identity, calendaring of public events, product identifiers and namespaces. 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.

P4. End of the Software Release Cycle. 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 also no accident that scripting languages such as Perl, Python, PHP, and now Ruby, play such a large role at web 2.0 companies. Perl was famously described by Hassan Schroeder, Sun's first webmaster, as "the duct tape of the internet."

Users must be treated as co-developers, in a reflection of open source development practices (even if the software in question is unlikely to be released under an open source license).

P5. Lightweight Programming Models. RSS, SOAP, XML data over HTTP, REST, AJAX support lightweight programming models that allow for loosely coupled systems. Think syndication, not coordination. Design for hackability and remixability.
Moreover, when commodity components are abundant, you can create value simply by assembling them in novel or effective ways (Innovation in Assembly:).

P6. Software Above the Level of a Single Device. To date, iTunes is the best exemplar 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. TiVo is another good example.

P7. Rich User Experiences. Ajax isn't a technology. It's really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways. Ajax incorporates:
  • standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS;
  • dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;
  • data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
  • asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;
  • and JavaScript binding everything together.
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 of such an application, although it hasn't yet gained wide traction. Writely is a good example of such an application, although it hasn't yet gained wide traction.