Summarize the What Is Web 2.0
- 1. Summarize the What Is Web 2.0 by Tim O'Reilly
- 2. Web 1.0 Web 2.0 DoubleClick Google AdSense Ofoto Flickr Akamai BitTorrent mp3.com Napster Britannica Online Wikipedia personal websites blogging evite upcoming.org and EVDB domain name speculation search engine optimization screen scraping web services publishing participation content management systems wikis directories (taxonomy) tagging ("folksonomy") stickiness syndication
- 3. The Web As Platform Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn't have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core. visualize Web 2.0 Netscape vs. Google DoubleClick vs. Overture and AdSense Akamai vs. BitTorrent
- 4. Netscape vs. Google If Netscape was the standard bearer for Web 1.0 , Google is most certainly the standard bearer for Web 2.0 Netscape framed "the web as platform" in terms of the old software paradigm Google , by contrast, began its life as a native web application, never sold or packaged, but delivered as a service , with customers paying, for the use of that service No scheduled software releases, just continuous improvement No licensing or sale, just usage No porting to different platforms so that customers can run the software on their own equipment, just a massively scalable collection of commodity PCs running open source operating systems plus homegrown applications and utilities that no one outside the company ever gets to see.
- 5. DoubleClick vs. Overture and AdSense DoubleClick's offerings require a formal sales contract, limiting their market to the few thousand largest websites. Overture and Google figured out how to enable ad placement on virtually any web page, they eschewed ad-agency friendly advertising formats such as banner ads and popups in favor of minimally intrusive, context-sensitive, consumer-friendly text advertising. 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.
- 6. Akamai vs. BitTorrent BitTorrent thus demonstrates a key Web 2.0 principle: the service 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.
- 7. Harnessing Collective Intelligence Hyperlinking is the foundation of the web. Yahoo!, a catalog, or directory of links, an aggregation of the best work of thousands, then millions of web users. Google's breakthrough in search. PageRank, a method of using the link structure of the web rather than just the characteristics of documents eBay's product is the collective activity of all its users Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia based on the unlikely notion that an entry can be added by any web user, and edited by any other ; Eric Raymond's dictum that "with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow," The lesson: Network effects from user contributions are the key to market dominance in the Web 2.0 era. Blogging and the Wisdom of Crowds
- 8. Blogging and the Wisdom of Crowds RSS is the most significant advance in the fundamental architecture of the web since early hackers realized that CGI could be used to create database-backed websites. 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". 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
- 9. Blogging and the Wisdom of Crowds (Cont.) RSS was effectively the device that 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 or became more entrenched. The permalink was the first - and most successful - attempt to build bridges between weblogs.
- 10. Blogging and the Wisdom of Crowds (Cont.) If an essential part of Web 2.0 is harnessing 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 hear in all of our heads. It may not reflect the deep structure of the brain, which is often unconscious, but is instead the equivalent of conscious thought. And as a reflection of conscious thought and attention, the blogosphere has begun to have a powerful effect.
- 11. Data is the Next Intel Inside 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. Who owns the data? A further point must be noted with regard to data, and that is user concerns about privacy and their rights to their own data. In many of the early web applications, copyright is only loosely enforced. 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. Much as the rise of proprietary software led to the Free Software movement, we expect the rise of proprietary databases to result in a Free Data movement within the next decade.
- 12. End of the Software Release Cycle One of the defining characteristics of internet era software is that it is delivered as a service, not as a product. This fact leads to a number of fundamental changes in the business model of such a company: Operations must become a core competency ( Google must continuously crawl the web and update its indices, continuously filter out link spam and other attempts to influence its results, continuously and dynamically respond to hundreds of millions of asynchronous user queries, simultaneously matching them with context-appropriate advertisements ) Users must be treated as co-developers ( The open source dictum, "release early and release often" in fact has morphed into an even more radical position, "the perpetual beta," )
- 13. Lightweight Programming Models Support lightweight programming models that allow for loosely coupled systems Think syndication, not coordination Design for "hackability" and remixability Innovation in Assembly (When commodity components are abundant, you can create value simply by assembling them in novel or effective ways )
- 14. Lightweight Programming Models (Cont.) 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. Google Maps' simple AJAX (Javascript and XML) interface was quickly decrypted by hackers, who then proceeded to remix the data into new services Mapping-related web services had been available for some time from GIS vendors such as ESRI as well as from MapQuest and Microsoft MapPoint. But Google Maps set the world on fire because of its simplicity. 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
- 15. Software Above the Level of a Single Device One other feature of Web 2.0 that deserves mention is the fact that it's no longer limited to the PC platform 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 They are not web applications per se, but they leverage the power of the web platform, making it a seamless, almost invisible part of their infrastructure
- 16. Rich User Experiences Several years ago, Macromedia coined the term "Rich Internet Applications" (which has also been picked up by open source Flash competitor Laszlo Systems) to highlight the capabilities of Flash to deliver not just multimedia content but also GUI-style application 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
- 17. Rich User Experiences (Cont.) Nor will the Web 2.0 revolution be limited to PC applications. Salesforce.com demonstrates how the web can be used to deliver software as a service, in enterprise scale applications such as CRM. 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.
- 18. Core Competencies of Web 2.0 Companies 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 .