Web 2.0
Like so many other concepts, web 2.0 cannot be clearly defined by definite boundaries but much rather a gravitational core. It is basically a set of principles and practices that bind together a cluster of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles at varying degrees.
More info: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
The Web as a Platform
One of the fundamental principles of Web 2.0 is the treatment of the Web as a Platform. People don’t often construe the web in terms of Web Services. If you think about it, for a moment, ad serving is purely that. Every banner advert is a seamless co-operation between two sites, delivering an integrated page to the user, elsewhere in the world.
Let’s try and understand the distinction between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 by comparing two of the flagship companies of the respective standards. Netscape and Google.
The hallmark product of Netscape was the web browser and their strategy was to use their dominance in the browser market to establish supremacy of high speed server products. Netscape promoted a webtop instead of the desktop and planned to populate the webtop with information updated and applets pushed to the desktop by providers who purchased Netscape servers. In the end both turned out to be just commodities and more value was placed on delivery of services via the internet.
On the other hand and in stark contrast, Google came into existence as a web application delivering services, with customers paying directly or indirectly for the use of that service. No trapping of the old software model were present. In essence Google is just a massively scalable collection of commodity PCs running open source operating systems plus homegrown applications and utilities. This requires exceptional database management. Google isn’t just a collection of software tools; it is effective and good database management. Without the data the tools are useless. Without the tools the data is not manageable.
Google is not a server, though it is managed by a numerous servers. Nor is it a browser, though the applications are experienced through the browser. Google is the middleman between the user and his or her online experience. It’s what delivers to the user his or her online experience through and ever so complex network of servers.
In the earlier era the notion was that the web was about publishing, not participation, that size mattered, and that the advertiser not the end-user calls the shots. There were notions that the internet was increasingly being dominated by the large scaled websites.
The success of the companies in the Web 2.0 era comes from an understanding of what some have called the “long tail”. This is the collective power of smaller sites that make up the bulk of the internet. The offerings of the websites of the previous era required a formal sales contract. In contrast, Google had figured out ad placement on virtually any web page. Moreover Google turned away from publisher/ad agency advertising formats and steered towards contextual, consumer-friendly, non intrusive text advertising.
So, what is the moral of the story?
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.
Bittorent is another example that takes a radical approach towards internet decentralization. Every Client computer is also a server. Files are broken up into fragments that can be served from multiple locations, seamlessly leveraging on the network of downloader’s to provide both bandwidth and data to other user. Counter-intuitively, the more popular the file, the faster it can be served as there are more users providing bandwidth fragments to complete the file.
This demonstrates another important principle of the Web 2.0 era. A service automatically gets better the more people use it. Each user in the Web 2.0 era brings his own resources to the party. There’s an implicit participatory model, inherent in this paradigm. The service acts like an intelligent broker, connecting the edges to each other and harnessing the power of the users themselves.
Collective Intelligence
Much like the synapses in the brain which grow stronger with repetition and/or intensity, the web connections grows organically as the collective output of all users.
As an example, Yahoo! was born as a directory of links, an aggregation of the best work of thousands and millions of web users. Another example is Google’s Pagerank system which uses the linking structure of the web rather than just characteristics of the document to provide better search results.
EBay has grown to its size by the collective activity of all users. EBay has grown organically as the response to user activity. The company itself just provides the environment which facilitates this user activity.
Some companies take notion of collective participation even further. Wikipedia is based on the unlikely notion that entries can be added and edited by any users. This is a radical principle in trust based on the notion that “with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”.
Flickr too is based on a collaborative categorization of sites by freely chosen keywords, rather than any form of rigid categorization. This allows for multiple overlapping associations that the brain users rather than strict categorization.
Web 2.0 success stories are about the companies that have not advertised their products, but have become successes via viral marketing.
The moral? Network effects from user contributions are the key to market dominance in the Web 2.0 era.
Collective Wisdom of a crowd!
Essentially a blog is just like a personal homepage in diary format. However, the chronological organization of a blog drives and entirely different delivery, advertising and value chain. One of the most important components of this new arising is RSS. RSS is the most significant advance in the architecture of the web. RSS allows not only for a user to link to a page, but to link to it and update every time the page changes.
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.
The blog can be likened to the mental chatter of the ever so enormous “Global brain” of the internet. It is not the unconscious and deep rooted activity that we are not aware of, but more like the activity of the forebrain. As a reflection of conscious thought, the blogosphere has taken fundamental and important effects.
Of primary importance is the fact that search engines use link structure to predict useful pages. Bloggers, as the most prolific and timely linkers have a disproportionate effect on shaping search engine results. Since blogging is self-referential, where bloggers pay attention to other bloggers, this magnifies their visibility. However if this was just a way of increasing visibility blogging would be half as interesting. But blogging harnesses the power of collective intelligence which acts like a filter
Data is at the core of Web 2.0
Database management is a core competence of the new generation companies.
But, who owns the data? 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.
You can expect to see battles between data suppliers and vendors as both realize the relative importance of certain classes of data as building blocks of the Web 2.0 era.
While we are yet to determine the success of any particular startup or approach, it's clear that standards and solutions in these areas, effectively turning certain classes of data into reliable subsystems of the "internet operating system", will enable the next generation of applications.
Much as with the rise of proprietary software led to the Free Software movement, the rise of proprietary databases will lead to the Free Data movement, as one can already see in opensource projects such as Wikipedia where the users themselves have control over content and how it is displayed.
As pointed above, in the Web 2.0 era, software is delivered as a service not a product. This has fundamental and far-reaching ramifications.
- Operation is a core competence. The Web 2.0 companies’ product development must be matched by operational efficiency. This means that software will soon cease to exist unless it is maintained on a daily basis. As an example, Google must continuously crawl the web and update its indices, filtering out link span and any other attempts to shape the search results, continuously responding to millions of synchronous requests from users.
- Users must be treated as co-developers. This is a reflection of the open source movement. The dictum of release early, release often has spiraled into an even more radical position. The “Perpetual Beta” as borne by services such as Google et al.
Think Simple
Loosely coupled systems in support of light weight programming models. Corporate sponsored websites are designed to enable tight coupling. While sometimes this is essential, most and indeed some of the interesting applications can remain loosely coupled.
Syndication rather than co-ordination is the new order. Simple web services are about syndicated data towards and not about controlling what happens when it gets to the other end of the connection. This is fundamental to the internet itself.
Some rights are reserved. Systems like the original web, RSS and Ajax have a commonality. The barriers to re-use or hackability are extremely low. There is very little by way of intellectual property protection. Therefore, “Some rights reserved” as opposed to “All rights reserved”, is a useful sign post.
Innovation in Assembly
Innovation in assembly is yet another pillar of the Web 2.0 movement. When commodity components are abundant, you can create them simply by assembling them in novel ways or effective ways. Much like the PC revolution provided many opportunities for assembly in commodity hardware Web 2.0 will provide opportunities by harnessing and integrating the services provided by others.
Not just for a single device
Web 2.0 is no longer limited to the PC platform. I-Tunes is a stellar example of this point. This service seamlessly reaches from hand held devices to the web back-end. This is one of the areas of the Web 2.0 era where we can expect to witness the most dramatic changes, as more and more devices are connect to the new platform. Real time traffic monitoring and flash mobs are only few of the early warning signs of the capabilities of the new platform.
Rich User Experience
The potential of the web to deliver full scale applications wasn’t evident till Google introduced GMail and quickly followed up with Google Maps. These are web based applications delivering Rich User Interfaces allowing for PC link interactivity.
We can expect to see over the next few years, new web applications, both truly novel and with the richness of PC based applications. Every platform change has created opportunities for a leadership change in the dominant application of the previous platform.
The competitive opportunity for new entrants 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.
Core Competencies of Web 2.0 Companies
In exploring the seven principles above, we've highlighted some of the principal features of Web 2.0. Each of the examples we've explored demonstrates one or more of those key principles, but may miss others. Let's close, therefore, by summarizing what we believe to be the core competencies of Web 2.0 companies:
- Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
- Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
- Trusting users as co-developers
- Harnessing collective intelligence
- Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
- Software above the level of a single device
- Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models
The next time a company claims that it's "Web 2.0," test their features against the list above. The more points they score, the more they are worthy of the name. Remember, though, that excellence in one area may be more telling than some small steps in all seven.
Adapted from: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
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