Web 2.0

Frankly I do not care if you are Web 2.0, Web 1.0, etc. All I care about is what your service or product does, why it is valuable to the end user, why it is uniquely different from the competition, what the barriers to entry are, and how you plan on reaching your customers and how you will ultimately make money. Don't start your pitch with Web 2.0 ecochamber talk. In fact as Jeff and I discussed several companies and ideas, we concluded that most of them were just features and not companies.

So if you are an entrepreneur, stop talking about Web 2.0 and start talking about how you are going to scale your business and make money. Start talking about how you are going to create a defensible barrier to entry. Better yet, since it is so cheap and easy to get started show me why you are not just a feature, show me your user growth, and show me how you will maintain your competitive advantage.

Ed Sim, Web 2.0 Bubble - October 19, 2005

Web 2.0 is primarily interesting from a philosophical standpoint. It's about relinquishing control, it's about openness, it's about trust and authenticity. APIs, Tags, Ajax, mashups, and all that are symptoms, outputs, results of this philosophical bent.

Peter Merholz, Web 2.0 - It's not about the technology - August 10, 2005

a vision of the Web in which information is broken up into "microcontent" units that can be distributed over dozens of domains. The Web of documents has morphed into a Web of data. We are no longer just looking to the same old sources for information. Now we're looking to a new set of tools to aggregate and remix microcontent in new and useful ways.

Richard MacManus, Web 2.0 for Designers - May 4, 2005

Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an "architecture of participation," and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.

Tim O'Reilly, Web 2.0: Compact Definition? - October 1, 2005

Web 2.0 refers to a perceived transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of websites to a full-fledged computing platform serving web applications to end users. The proponents of this thinking expect that ultimately Web 2.0 services will replace desktop computing applications for many purposes.

Wikipedia, Web 2.0

Web 2.0, proper noun

The name given to the social and technical sophistication and maturity that mark the- Oh, screw it. Money! Money money money! Money! The money's back! Ha ha! Money!

Devil's Dictionary, Web 2.0

Web2.0 is about glocalization, it is about making global information available to local social contexts and giving people the flexibility to find, organize, share and create information in a locally meaningful fashion that is globally accessible. Technology and experience are both critical factors in this process, but they themselves are not Web2.0. Web2.0 is a structural shift in information flow. It is not simply about global->local or 1->many; it is about a constantly shifting, multi-directional complex flow of information with the information evolving as it flows. It is about new network structures that emerge out of global and local structures.

In order for Web2.0 to work, we need to pay attention to how different cultural contexts interpret the technology and support them in their variable interpretations. We need to create flexible infrastructures and build the unexpected connections that will permit creative re-use.

It's important to realize that Web2.0 is not a given - it is possible to fuck it up, especially if power and control get in the way. Web2.0 is a socio-technical problem and it cannot be solved in a technodeterminist way. Technology needs to support social and cultural practices rather than determining culture. Technology is architecture and, thus, the design of it is critical because the decisions made will have dramatic effects. Digital architecture is unburdened by atoms but it is not unburdened by human tendencies for control. We've already seen plenty of digital architects try to control the flexibility of their artifacts rather than allowing them to morph and evolve.

Web2.0 requires giving up control and ownership of information; information is meaningless to someone else if they can't repurpose it to make sense of it in their context. It is for this reason that technology is not enough - there will be political features of Web2.0 as technological development and cultural desires run head-on against legislation and political support of old skool information organizations. This is why IP and copyright issues are also critical to Web2.0.

Web2.0 also requires keeping local cultural values consciously present at all times. There is a great potential to be problematically disruptive, to destroy local culture while trying to support it. We all have a tendency to build our needs into technology but the value of Web2.0 is to allow everyone to build their needs into the technology, not just those doing the building. Trampling culture would be devastating.

For Web2.0 to be successful, technology and policy must follow glocalized needs and desires. This will be a complex and challenging process full of complicated issues as technologists, designers, social scientists and politicos engage in an unknown dance with very different values and pressures. This dance can and probably will disrupt nation-state and institutional structures; these groups will work hard to stop the destruction of their power. Neither China nor the RIAA really wants Web2.0 to happen and folks like them have the potential to really foul it up.

Danah Boyd, Why Web2.0 Matters: Preparing for Glocalization

User-Centered Web 2.0 Themes

In an effort to get away from a dependence on technical themes and definitions, the following list comprises some of the major user-centered themes of Web 2.0.

The Value of Networked Software - software that is networked is much more valuable than software that isn't. Web 2.0 software is networked, taking advantage of the increasing set of users, tools, and services available. By accessing services on the network, people can realize huge efficiency gains in their personal and professional lives.

The Attention Economy - the current economy on the Web where the most finite resource - a person's attention - becomes the most valuable. Software and services vie for this poverty of attention, creating an amazing new attention-related problems for people.

Architecture of Participation - building a networked software architecture that supports participation by many parties in the network.

Harnessing Collective Intelligence - the idea that systems can become more valuable by providing mechanisms for users to amplify their intelligence and share it with others.

Personal Recommendation Systems - the ultimate reward for those participating in Web 2.0 software, recommendation systems provide personalized recommendations based on actual behavioral metrics and preferences. These systems cut away many of the inefficiencies that the Attention Economy has burdened us with.

Joshua Porter, Introduction to Web 2.0

1. Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
2. Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
3. Trusting users as co-developers
4. Harnessing collective intelligence
5. Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
6. Software above the level of a single device
7. Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models

Ian Kennedy, Web 2.0 Acid Test - October 2, 2005

1. RSS (Really Simple Syndication)
2. User Scripts (Greasemonkey)
3. Widgets (Dashboard, Konfabulator, etc.)
4. Canvas (2D Graphics Using JavaScript)
5. E4X (JavaScript Extension for XML)
6. Ajax (XmlHttpRequest)
7. VoIP (Voice over IP - dragonCrew.com addition)
8. Wiki's (Knowledgement of the future - dragonCrew.com addition)

Robert Scales, What's Web 2.0? - August 13, 2005

1. Writing semantic markup (transition to XML)
2. Providing Web services (moving away from place)
3. Remixing content (about when and what, not who or why)
4. Emergent navigation and relevance (users are in control)
5. Adding metadata over time (communities building social information)
6. Shift to programming (separation of structure and style)

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
page views	-->	cost per click
screen scraping	-->	web services
publishing	-->	participation
content management systems	-->	wikis
directories (taxonomy)	-->	tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness	-->	syndication

Tim O'Reilly, What Is Web 2.0 - Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software - September 30, 2005

Google is there. Yahoo is on the way. Microsoft is trying hard to be there but is weighed down by a ton of legacy baggage. What I am talking about is web 2.0, a new perception of the internet characterised by interactivity and personalisation.

The technical drivers behind web 2.0 include broadband connections, cheap storage, and connected mobile devices. On the software side, RSS news feeds, Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), and XML web services are important. That said, web 2.0 is not so much about specific technologies, but more to do with new ways of exploiting what an always-on global network can do.

Web 2.0 doesn't really exist, it's an idea, a "meme" in the new jargon. Even so, it is easy to spot the web sites and applications that get it. Web 2.0 sites are portal-friendly, easy to aggregate and easy to link to. This is where representational state transfer (Rest) architecture is valuable - the idea that even on a dynamic site everything should be URL-addressable.

If a site has an API or even just an RSS feed, someone is thinking on the right lines, especially if it is useful for mobile devices as well as the desktop. Another characteristic is simplicity. Web 2.0 sites do everything to accommodate the user. Finally, web 2.0 is about conversation, which is not just a feedback form, but new ways of interacting with users.

Tim Anderson, IT Week, Is your company ready for web 2.0? - August 2, 2005

Web 2.0 Checklist

• Give us your email address, we'll let you know when it's ready!
• Public beta alpha
• Tags
• Feeds for everything
• Built with Rails
• Sprinkled with Ajax
• Yellow fade
• Blue gradients
• Big icons
• Big fonts
• Big input boxes
• REST API
• Google Maps mashup
• Share with a friend
• TypePad blog for a peek inside the team
• Feature screencasts (thanks, Waxy!)
• Hackathons for new features
• Development wiki
• Business model optimized for the long tail
• It's Free!/AdSense revenue stream

Ta-da List, Web 2.0 Checklist

The buzz was exciting, exhilarating for some, clearly. But so much of what I saw felt like the go-go greed I haven't seen with such intensity since, gasp, 1999. Build-to-flip felt like it was now driving everything. I was nauseated when Business 2.0, a magazine I used to respect, had run its cover story -- what, a year ago? -- on the concept of build-to-flip. But it wasn't just a cover story. It was a how-to cover story. Ever noticed who advertises in Business 2.0? Take a look sometime. And it's not just the ads: it's become a lifestyle magazine, complete with reviews for Porsches and Bentleys. They ought to rename it Flipper: The Magazine for the Build-to-Flip Generation.

I don't want to flip EVDB. I was thinking about this every time someone at the conference would ask me, "So! When does EVDB get gobbled up for $75 million!" Gee, perhaps when it's worth $75 million and it makes total sense to have it "gobbled"? Two criteria, not just one.

This isn't a build-to-flip. We're building to grip here at EVDB. We're going to hold on and we're going to see the vision through. We're building tools for the whole world to gobble up and benefit from.

Brian Dear, Beer and Loathing at Web2.0: Part Two - October 10, 2005

1. I for one welcome SkypeBay and GoogleNet, our new corporate overlords
2. What's value for money in the New Walled Gardens?
3. Packet-level Balkanization
4. On every Commons, a toxin
5. The China Syndrome
6. The Rise of the Anti-Social Software Movement
7. Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models

Andrew Orlowski, The Register, Six Things you need to know about Bubble 2.0 - October 7, 2005

The Skype deal is absolutely a return to the 1999 mentality," says Pip Coburn of Coburn Ventures, a technology-strategy firm. It and many of the other recent and mooted internet deals seem to be based on little more than the belief of management that everything is going to change dramatically in the next few years, in highly unpredictable ways, and so all options need to be covered. Given that mentality, says Mr Coburn, a manager "can pretty much justify paying any price".

Boobie Johnson, Economist examines "Bubble 2.0" - October 7, 2005

As with anything, it's not the technology that matters, it's the proper application and the execution of that technology that counts. And most of all it's how well we hide the technology.

Jason Fried, XMLHttpRequest, Ajax, and the customer experience - February 24, 2005

Funny, but scary too. So it goes with such worms. A clever idea goes terribly wrong and has consequences thousands of times more extensive than the creator imagined.

The Ajaxy bits of Web 2.0 that bring us an increase in client-side power also open up new vistas of malware. A post on Google Blogoscoped (which calls the worm "truly Web 2.0") links to an example of the exploit code; reading that code really makes it sink in. A Javascript one-liner brought down one of the most popular sites on the web. (Also see comments here that clarify some of the technical details.)

Cross-site scripting (XSS) is now about a hell of a lot more than misleading alert boxes or tricky links. The Wikipedia article on XSS divides exploits into Level Type 0, Level Type 1, and Level Type 2. The description of Level Type 2 (the most severe) notes that it involves script code stored on the server (as in this case), but says that the attacker "may not need to use the web application itself to exploit such a hole."

I'd say we now have a new type -- Level Type 3 -- in which the web application is an integral part of the exploit.

Paul Bissex, The MySpace worm - October 13, 2005

As with anything, it's not the technology that matters, it's the proper application and the execution of that technology that counts. And most of all it's how well we hide the technology.

The cunning JavaScript exploit added a million users as "friends", forcing the site offline. Service was restored on Friday but two days later the site was still struggling with the consequences, serving pages at a glacial pace.

A Google fan blog calls it "truly Web 2.0" - the buzzword attached to the latest attempt to generate a hype around the internet's most popular presentation layer. Paul Bissex has a lucid explanation.

Andrew Orlowski, Web 2.0 worm downs MySpace - October 17, 2005