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What Is Web 2.0
Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software
by Tim O’Reilly
09/30/2005
The bursting of the dot-com bubble in the fall of 2001 marked a turning point for the web. Many people concluded that the web was overhyped, when in fact bubbles and consequent shakeouts appear to be a common feature of all technological revolutions. Shakeouts typically mark the point at which an ascendant technology is ready to take its place at center stage. The pretenders are given the bum’s rush, the real success stories show their strength, and there begins to be an understanding of what separates one from the other.
The concept of “Web 2.0″ began with a conference brainstorming session between O’Reilly and MediaLive International. Dale Dougherty, web pioneer and O’Reilly VP, noted that far from having “crashed”, the web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity. What’s more, the companies that had survived the collapse seemed to have some things in common. Could it be that the dot-com collapse marked some kind of turning point for the web, such that a call to action such as “Web 2.0″ might make sense? We agreed that it did, and so the Web 2.0 Conference was born.
In the year and a half since, the term “Web 2.0″ has clearly taken hold, with more than 9.5 million citations in Google. But there’s still a huge amount of disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means, with some people decrying it as a meaningless marketing buzzword, and others accepting it as the new conventional wisdom.
This article is an attempt to clarify just what we mean by Web 2.0.
In our initial brainstorming, we formulated our sense of Web 2.0 by example:
| 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 |
The list went on and on. But what was it that made us identify one application or approach as “Web 1.0″ and another as “Web 2.0″? (The question is particularly urgent because the Web 2.0 meme has become so widespread that companies are now pasting it on as a marketing buzzword, with no real understanding of just what it means. The question is particularly difficult because many of those buzzword-addicted startups are definitely not Web 2.0, while some of the applications we identified as Web 2.0, like Napster and BitTorrent, are not even properly web applications!) We began trying to tease out the principles that are demonstrated in one way or another by the success stories of web 1.0 and by the most interesting of the new applications.
1. The Web As Platform
Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn’t have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core. You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core.
Figure 1 shows a “meme map” of Web 2.0 that was developed at a brainstorming session during FOO Camp, a conference at O’Reilly Media. It’s very much a work in progress, but shows the many ideas that radiate out from the Web 2.0 core.
For example, at the first Web 2.0 conference, in October 2004, John Battelle and I listed a preliminary set of principles in our opening talk. The first of those principles was “The web as platform.” Yet that was also a rallying cry of Web 1.0 darling Netscape, which went down in flames after a heated battle with Microsoft. What’s more, two of our 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 serving was the first widely deployed web service, and the first widely deployed “mashup” (to use another term that has gained currency of late). Every banner ad is served as a seamless cooperation between two websites, delivering an integrated page to a reader on yet another computer. Akamai also treats the network as the platform, and at a deeper level of the stack, building a transparent caching and content delivery network that eases bandwidth congestion.
Nonetheless, these pioneers provided useful contrasts because later entrants 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 embracing additional Web 2.0 design patterns.
Let’s drill down for a moment into each of these three cases, teasing out some of the essential elements of difference.
Netscape vs. Google
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 IPOs were defining events for each era. So let’s start with a comparison of these two companies and their positioning.
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. Control over standards for displaying content and applications in the browser would, in theory, give Netscape the kind of market power enjoyed by Microsoft in the PC market. Much like the “horseless carriage” framed the automobile as an extension of the familiar, Netscape promoted a “webtop” to replace the desktop, and planned to populate that webtop with information updates and applets pushed to the webtop by information providers who would purchase Netscape servers.
In the end, both web browsers and web servers turned out to be commodities, and value moved “up the stack” to services delivered over the web platform.
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 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.
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.
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. Much like a phone call, which happens not just on the phones at either end of the call, but on the network in between, Google happens in the space between browser and search engine and destination content server, as an enabler or middleman between the user and his or her online experience.
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
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.
As a result, DoubleClick proudly cites on its website “over 2000 successful implementations” of its software. Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) and Google AdSense, by contrast, already serve hundreds of thousands of advertisers apiece.
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. Overture and Google figured out how to enable ad placement on virtually any web page. What’s more, they eschewed publisher/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.
A Platform Beats an Application Every TimeIn each of its past confrontations with rivals, Microsoft has successfully played the platform card, trumping even the most dominant applications. Windows allowed Microsoft to displace Lotus 1-2-3 with Excel, WordPerfect with Word, and Netscape Navigator with Internet Explorer. This time, though, the clash isn’t between a platform and an application, but between two platforms, each with a radically different business model: On the one side, 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. Windows represents the pinnacle of proprietary control via software APIs. Netscape tried to wrest control from Microsoft using the same techniques that Microsoft itself had used against other rivals, and failed. But Apache, which held to the open standards of the web, has prospered. The battle is no longer unequal, a platform versus a single application, but platform versus platform, with the question being which platform, and more profoundly, which architecture, and which business model, is better suited to the opportunity ahead. Windows was a brilliant solution to the problems of the early PC era. It leveled the playing field for application developers, solving a host of problems that had previously bedeviled the industry. But a single monolithic approach, controlled by a single vendor, is no longer a solution, it’s a problem. Communications-oriented systems, as the internet-as-platform most certainly is, require interoperability. Unless a vendor can control both ends of every interaction, the possibilities of user lock-in via software APIs are limited. 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 lock-in and competitive advantage, but we believe they are not to be found via control over software APIs and protocols. There is a new game afoot. The companies that succeed in the Web 2.0 era will be those that understand the rules of that game, rather than trying to go back to the rules of the PC software era. |
Not surprisingly, other web 2.0 success stories demonstrate this same behavior. eBay enables occasional transactions of only a few dollars between single individuals, acting as an automated intermediary. Napster (though shut down for legal reasons) built its network not by building a centralized song database, but by architecting a system in such a way that every downloader also became a server, and thus grew the network.
Akamai vs. BitTorrent
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.
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.
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.
2. Harnessing Collective Intelligence
The central principle behind the success of the giants born in the Web 1.0 era who have survived to lead the Web 2.0 era appears to be this, that they have embraced the power of the web to harness collective intelligence:
- Hyperlinking is the foundation of the web. As users add new content, and new sites, it is bound in 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.
- Yahoo!, the first great internet success story, was born as a catalog, or directory of links, an aggregation of the best work of thousands, then millions of web users. While Yahoo! has since moved into the business of creating many types of content, its role as a portal to the collective work of the net’s users remains the core of its value.
- Google’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.
- 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. What’s more, eBay’s competitive advantage comes almost entirely from the critical mass of buyers and sellers, which makes any new entrant offering similar services significantly less attractive.
- 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. They have an order of magnitude more user reviews, invitations to participate in varied ways on virtually every page–and even more importantly, they use user activity to produce better search results. While a Barnesandnoble.com search is likely to lead with the company’s own products, or sponsored results, Amazon always leads with “most popular”, a real-time computation based not only on sales but other factors that Amazon insiders call the “flow” around products. With an order of magnitude more user participation, it’s no surprise that Amazon’s sales also outpace competitors.
Now, innovative companies that pick up on this insight and perhaps extend it even further, are making their mark on the web:
- 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 profound change in the dynamics of 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. 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.
- Collaborative spam filtering products like Cloudmark aggregate the individual decisions of email users about what is and is not spam, outperforming systems that rely on analysis of the messages themselves.
- It is a truism that the greatest internet success stories don’t advertise their products. Their adoption is driven by “viral marketing”–that is, recommendations propagating directly from one user to another. You can almost make the case that if a site or product relies on advertising to get the word out, it isn’t Web 2.0.
- 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. Anyone can add a project, anyone can download and use the code, and new projects migrate from the edges to the center as a result of users putting them to work, an organic software adoption process relying almost entirely on viral marketing.
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
One of the most highly touted 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 as Rich Skrenta notes, the chronological organization of a blog “seems like a trivial difference, but it drives an entirely different delivery, advertising and value chain.”
One of the things that has made a difference is a technology called RSS. 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”.
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 the links. A link to a weblog is expected to point to a perennially 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.
The Architecture of ParticipationSome systems are designed to encourage participation. In his paper, The Cornucopia of the Commons, Dan Bricklin noted that there are three ways to build a large database. The first, demonstrated by Yahoo!, is to pay people to do it. The second, inspired by lessons from 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 Napster demonstrated a third way. Because Napster set its defaults to automatically serve any music that was downloaded, every user automatically helped to build the value of the shared database. This same approach has been followed by all other P2P file sharing services. 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. Therefore, Web 2.0 companies set inclusive defaults for aggregating 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. Mitch Kapor once noted that “architecture is politics.” Participation is intrinsic to Napster, part of its fundamental architecture. This architectural insight may also be more central to the success of open source software than the more frequently cited appeal to volunteerism. The architecture of the internet, and the World Wide Web, as well as of open source software projects like Linux, Apache, and Perl, is such that users pursuing their own “selfish” interests build collective value as an automatic byproduct. Each of these projects has a small core, well-defined extension mechanisms, and an approach that lets any well-behaved component be added by anyone, growing the outer layers of what Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, refers to as “the onion.” In other words, these technologies demonstrate network effects, simply through the way that they have been designed. These projects can be seen to have a natural architecture of participation. But as Amazon demonstrates, by consistent effort (as well as economic incentives such as the Associates program), it is possible to overlay such an architecture on a system that would not normally seem to possess it. |
RSS also means that the web browser is not the only means of viewing a web page. While some RSS aggregators, such as Bloglines, are web-based, others are desktop clients, and still others allow users of portable devices to subscribe to constantly updated content.
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.
But RSS is only part of what makes a weblog different from an ordinary web page. Tom Coates remarks on the significance of the permalink:
It may seem like a trivial piece of functionality now, but it 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.
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. 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. Hypertext purists have celebrated trackbacks as a step towards two way links. But note that trackbacks are not properly two-way–rather, they are really (potentially) symmetrical one-way links that create the effect of two way links. The difference may seem subtle, but in practice it is enormous. Social networking systems like Friendster, Orkut, and LinkedIn, which require acknowledgment by the recipient in order to establish a connection, lack the same scalability as the web. As noted by Caterina Fake, co-founder of the Flickr photo sharing service, attention is only coincidentally reciprocal. (Flickr thus allows users to set watch lists–any user can subscribe to any other user’s photostream via RSS. The object of attention is notified, but does not have to approve the connection.)
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.
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. The “echo chamber” that critics decry is also an amplifier.
If it were merely an amplifier, blogging would be uninteresting. But like Wikipedia, blogging harnesses collective intelligence as a kind of filter. What James Suriowecki calls “the wisdom of crowds” comes into play, and much as PageRank produces better results than analysis of any individual document, the collective attention of the blogosphere selects for value.
While mainstream media may see individual blogs as competitors, what is really unnerving is that 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 the world of what Dan Gillmor calls “we, the media,” a world in which “the former audience”, not a few people in a back room, decides what’s important.
3. Data is the Next Intel Inside
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. As Hal Varian remarked in a personal conversation last year, “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 fact leads to a key question: Who owns the data?
In the internet era, one can already see a number of cases where control over the database has led to market control and outsized financial returns. The monopoly on domain name registry initially granted by government fiat to Network Solutions (later purchased by Verisign) was one of the first great moneymakers of the internet. While we’ve argued that business advantage via controlling software APIs is much more difficult in the age of the internet, control of key data sources is not, especially if those data sources are expensive to create or amenable to increasing returns via network effects.
Look at the copyright notices at the base of every map served by MapQuest, 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 substantial 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.” 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.
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, yet 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.
Contrast, however, the position of Amazon.com. Like competitors such as Barnesandnoble.com, its original database came from ISBN registry provider R.R. Bowker. But unlike MapQuest, Amazon relentlessly enhanced the data, adding publisher-supplied data such as cover images, table of contents, index, and sample material. Even more importantly, they harnessed their users to annotate the data, such that after ten years, Amazon, not Bowker, is the primary source for bibliographic data on books, a reference source for scholars and librarians as well as consumers. Amazon also introduced their own proprietary identifier, the ASIN, which corresponds to the ISBN where one is present, and creates an equivalent namespace for products without one. Effectively, Amazon “embraced and extended” their data suppliers.
Imagine if MapQuest had done the same thing, 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.
The recent introduction of Google Maps provides a living laboratory for 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. Paul Rademacher’s housingmaps.com, which combines Google Maps with Craigslist apartment rental and home purchase data to create an interactive housing search tool, is the pre-eminent example of such a mashup.
At present, these mashups 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.
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.
For example, in the area of identity, PayPal, Amazon’s 1-click, and the millions of users of communications systems, may all be legitimate contenders to build a network-wide identity database. (In this regard, Google’s recent attempt to use cell phone numbers as an identifier for Gmail accounts may be a step towards embracing and extending the phone system.) Meanwhile, startups like Sxip are exploring the potential of federated identity, in quest of a kind of “distributed 1-click” that will provide a seamless Web 2.0 identity subsystem. In the area of calendaring, EVDB is an attempt to build the world’s largest shared calendar via a wiki-style architecture of participation. While the jury’s still out on 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.
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. 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.
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. One can see early signs of this countervailing trend in open data projects such as Wikipedia, the Creative Commons, and in software projects like Greasemonkey, which allow users to take control of how data is displayed on their computer.
4. End of the Software Release Cycle
As noted above in the discussion of Google vs. Netscape, 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’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. 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.It’s no accident that Google’s system administration, networking, and load balancing techniques are perhaps even 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.
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.” Dynamic languages (often called scripting languages and looked down on by the software engineers of the era of software artifacts) are the tool of choice for system and network administrators, as well as application developers building dynamic systems that require constant change.
- 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.) 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 slipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly, or even daily 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.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.”
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 won’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.”
While Microsoft has demonstrated enormous 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 software company) to become a deeply different kind of company. 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.
A Web 2.0 Investment ThesisVenture capitalist Paul Kedrosky writes: “The key is to find the actionable investments where you disagree with the consensus”. It’s interesting to see how each Web 2.0 facet involves disagreeing with the consensus: everyone was emphasizing keeping data private, Flickr/Napster/et al. make it public. It’s not just disagreeing to be disagreeable (pet food! online!), 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 it 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 in return for speed and breadth. Napster gave up on the idea of “the catalog” (all the songs the vendor was selling) and got breadth. Amazon gave up on the idea of having a physical storefront but got to serve the entire world. Google gave up on the big customers (initially) and got the 80% whose needs weren’t being met. There’s something very aikido (using your opponent’s force against them) in saying “you know, you’re right–absolutely anyone in the whole world CAN update this article. And guess what, that’s bad news for you.” –Nat Torkington |
5. Lightweight Programming Models
Once the idea of web services became au courant, large companies jumped into the fray with a complex web services stack designed to create highly reliable programming environments for distributed applications.
But much as the web succeeded precisely because it overthrew much of hypertext theory, substituting a simple pragmatism for ideal design, RSS has become perhaps the single most widely deployed web service because of its simplicity, while the complex corporate web services stacks have yet to achieve wide deployment.
Similarly, Amazon.com’s web services are provided in two forms: one adhering to the formalisms of the SOAP (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.
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.
There are several significant lessons here:
- Support lightweight programming models that allow for loosely coupled systems. 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!
- Think syndication, not coordination. 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.
- 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. 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.
Innovation in Assembly
Lightweight business models are a natural concomitant of lightweight programming and lightweight connections. The Web 2.0 mindset is good at re-use. A new service like housingmaps.com was built simply by snapping together two existing services. Housingmaps.com doesn’t have a business model (yet)–but for many small-scale services, Google AdSense (or perhaps Amazon associates fees, or both) provides the snap-in equivalent of a revenue model.
These examples provide an insight into 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 novel or effective ways. Much as the PC revolution provided many opportunities for innovation in assembly of commodity hardware, with companies like Dell making a science out of such assembly, thereby defeating companies whose business model required innovation in product development, we believe that Web 2.0 will provide opportunities for companies to beat the competition by getting better at harnessing and integrating services provided by others.
6. 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. 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.”
Of course, any web application can be seen as software above the level of a single device. After all, even the simplest web application involves at least two computers: the one hosting the web server and the one hosting the browser. And 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-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.
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.
iTunes and TiVo also demonstrate many of the other core principles of Web 2.0. 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. Data management is most clearly the heart of their offering. They are services, not packaged applications (although in the case of iTunes, it can be used as a packaged application, managing only the user’s local data.) What’s more, both TiVo and iTunes show some budding use of collective intelligence, although in each case, their experiments are at war with the IP lobby’s. There’s only a limited architecture of participation in iTunes, though the recent addition of podcasting changes that equation substantially.
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 are only a few of the early warning signs of the capabilities of the new platform.
7. Rich User Experiences
As early as Pei Wei’s Viola browser in 1992, the web was being used to deliver “applets” and other kinds of active content within the web browser. Java’s introduction in 1995 was framed around the delivery of such applets. JavaScript and then DHTML were introduced as lightweight ways to provide client side programmability and richer 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.
However, the potential of the web to deliver full scale applications didn’t hit the mainstream till Google introduced Gmail, quickly followed by Google Maps, web based applications with rich user interfaces and PC-equivalent interactivity. The collection of technologies used by Google was christened AJAX, in a seminal essay by Jesse James Garrett of web design firm Adaptive Path. He wrote:
“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.”
Web 2.0 Design PatternsIn 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.”
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AJAX is also a key component of Web 2.0 applications such as Flickr, now part of Yahoo!, 37signals’ applications basecamp and backpack, as well as other Google applications such as Gmail and Orkut. We’re entering an unprecedented period of user interface innovation, as web developers are finally able to build web applications as rich as local PC-based applications.
Interestingly, many of the capabilities now being explored have been around for many years. In the late ’90s, both Microsoft and Netscape had a vision of the kind of capabilities that are now finally being realized, but their battle over the standards to be used made cross-browser applications difficult. It was only when Microsoft definitively won the browser wars, and there was a single de-facto browser standard to write to, that this kind of application became possible. And while Firefox has reintroduced competition to the browser market, at least so far we haven’t seen the destructive competition over web standards that held back progress in the ’90s.
We expect to see many new web applications over the next few years, both truly novel applications, and rich web reimplementations of PC applications. Every platform change to date has also created opportunities for a leadership change in the dominant applications of the previous platform.
Gmail has already provided some interesting innovations in email, combining the strengths of the web (accessible from anywhere, deep database competencies, searchability) with user interfaces that approach PC interfaces in usability. Meanwhile, other mail clients on the PC platform are nibbling away at the problem from the other end, adding IM and presence capabilities. How far are we from an integrated communications client combining the best of email, IM, and the cell phone, using VoIP to add voice capabilities to the rich capabilities of web applications? The race is on.
It’s easy to see how Web 2.0 will also remake the address book. A Web 2.0-style address book would treat the local address book on the PC or phone merely as a cache of the contacts you’ve explicitly asked the system to remember. Meanwhile, a web-based synchronization agent, Gmail-style, would remember every message sent or received, every email address and every phone number used, and build social networking heuristics to decide which ones to offer up as alternatives when an answer wasn’t found in the local cache. Lacking an answer there, the system would query the broader social network.
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.
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.
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.
Tim O’Reilly
O’Reilly Media, Inc., tim@oreilly.com
President and CEO
You must be logged in to the O’Reilly Network to post a talkback.
Showing messages 1 through 150 of 150.
- WEB 2.0
2008-01-07 04:59:31 Afitriyadi [Reply | View]Tim, thank you very much for your deep information about WEB 2.0.
- World 2.0
2008-01-02 15:46:21 dejudicibus [Reply | View]New year, new life? Time will tell… In the meantime, I invite you to read my latest post on my blog about a new definition of Web 2.0 and the proposal for an exciting Web 2.0 world-wide project: World 2.0 (http://lindipendente.splinder.com/post/15354690/World+2.0). That article is in English language, even if the rest of blog is in Italian language.
- Web2.0 concepts in real world: barcamps, unconferences
2007-12-24 22:02:48 khan_sultan [Reply | View]Web 2.0 concepts & principles are not just limited to technology or internet websites alone. We are seeing the concepts of web 2.0 being adapted and adopted in the real world as well. For example the ‘uconferences’ and barcamps are all about the Web 2.0 concepts & principles.See a blog entry here on the similarities between Web2.0 principles & unconferences/barcamps
http://shahnawazkhan.wordpress.com/2007/12/25/whats-similar-between-the-concepts-and-principles-behind-web20-and-unconferences/
- Web2.0 website – File Sharing!
2007-12-23 07:12:53 Jonathanjir [Reply | View]I found a New Bird with unlimited features http://www.ziddu.com , Hope it will hit rapidshare soon.
- Web 2.0 Article-For the Future
2007-12-17 19:53:36 TravelTech [Reply | View]Tim. I found your article very informative regarding the future and Web activity. Just what I was searching for regarding my own future as well. Could you give some direction to someone wanting to program web apps, with a business systems analyst/VBA background that has played with designing websites knowing only HTML and CSS. AJAX seems to be the future but I see many adds on the net looking for PHP programmers. In need of direction from those who know.
Thanks
PGB
The travel tech.
- This is what I understand. Would like to know if its correct…
2007-12-13 00:30:52 AnkitJain [Reply | View]I understand Web 2.0 as a phenomenon which is for the user and by the user. The user will still be doing the same things like sharing (thoughts,details & perceptions), interacting, publishing etc etc but by his choice or ways. Where he is not punished to bear the unwanted advertisements or barriers of speed. he(user) has a freedom to express.it may be much more than this. if i can get some comments on this.
- Who owns the data?
2007-12-09 16:42:35 AndyWong [Reply | View]I regret I did not read your landmark article earlier. I agree almost all.
You claims
“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. 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.”I regard, the users should by principle own the data, as the users created the content. This is very simple, you post a paper note to a bulletin board, and you own the content, not the bulletin board. However, the service providers own the collective intelligence.
Google had got it right. The CEO Eric Schmidt claimed many times that Google tried hard to make the users truly own the data by providing convenient methods for the users to retrieve data and put the data to other platforms. As long as Google has the greatest assets of collective intelligence, Google is not in fear of users moving the data away.
- Your article on Web 2.0 was like taking a course!
2007-11-26 16:43:44 HarrietT [Reply | View]Thank you for your article on Web 2.0. I see the term often and had no idea what it was. I just had to enter in the search mode to find out. Although, some of the terms you use, I need to research and become familiar with, I can truly say that your article was a mini lesson in itself. Where do I fit in? I’m an entreprenuer who wants to create a website for my clients.
I want all the features of a 2.0., or as many as I can get. Where do I go from here?
- YADOW2 :: Yet another definition of Web 2.0
2007-11-15 05:27:57 dejudicibus [Reply | View]I read the article and also many other definitions of what web 2.0 is. Each one was interesting and each one was partially true, but none satisfied me. So I thought about it and at last I developed my own one. I decided to share it here for comments and criticisms. By sure it is not better than the others nor the most complete, but I think it may work. In any case it is my two-cent contribute to the debate. I apologize for my poor English, but my first language is Italian.?Web 2.0 is a knowledge-oriented environment where human interactions generates contents that are published, managed and used through network applications in a service oriented architecture.?
Dr. Dario de Judicibus
Knowledge Management & Social Networking
Managing Consultant
IBM Italia
- Nice article……
2007-11-01 04:40:34 MIracleStudios-webdesigncompany [Reply | View]I was here to understand the intricacies Web 2.0.As MIracleStudios (www.miraclestudios.in) is planning to launch Web 2.0. services to its clients.
All in all it was a great read
VIki
- Web 2.0 for Internet Entrepreneurs
2007-10-27 01:38:12 WizzardofBuzz [Reply | View]Web 2.0 has evolved in the two years since this article which is looking at the subject from a macro view and the evolution of tech. My take is that Web 2.0 is about people being able to express themselves, more fully, more powerfully, and playfully. Specifically, the evolution of “social marketing” is an interesting development. I get into it in my blog: web2.0magic.net . . .
How to use web 2.0 tech to get your message out.
- Web 2.0 – useful to me??
2007-10-22 09:25:56 michaelfarnham [Reply | View]How would web 2.0 benefit my website
http://XmasDVD.comIf I can take advantage of some Web 2.0′ability I would like to.
Please post suggestions here.
Thanks!- Web 2.0 – useful to me??
2007-11-13 16:22:02 kevinmoreland [Reply | View]Michael
Web 2.0 is useful in a number of ways. Exactly how depends on the nature of your business. But it enables you to let customers know what’s happening and enables them to conribute content and feedback about your business and their experiences. By displaying this feedback you’re sending a clear message that you’re an authentic, open and transparent operation who is interested in the views of your customers.
i hope this helps
- Web 2.0 – useful to me??
- Another example of Web 2.0
2007-10-17 00:42:17 Jimmy_comment [Reply | View]Web 1.0 game provider is providing the game software for the players. Even if the interactive can be multi-players, it is more a packaged software.Web 2.0 should consider to provide a platform for the players to play eg. Poker or Majong, as a service, then we should consider of the business service of providing a forum enabling the players (participants), the game/gambling hoster (who can set the rules) to setup any games.
- Google’s breakthrough?
2007-09-28 00:14:21 smaaps [Reply | View]First of all, this article was very nice to read.There is one thing though, that I do not fully agree with:
“Google’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.”
I remember the day a colleague at work told me about this new web search called “goggle” or something like that. When I finally found the site and tried the search there were 3 things that made me stuck with google.
1) It was very fast.
2) It was very fast.
3) The first page was simply a logo, a search field, two buttons and three or four links. Not like yahoo, msn, fireball, etc. where the whole screen was filled with links and images and you had to scroll far down.At the beginning the search results were not a lot better than those of the other search engines, but they were definitely not worse. And it was very, very fast.
- Final Thesis
2007-09-13 05:41:26 Ollie83 [Reply | View]Hello,first I have to say that grat article you have witten. Thanks for that.
I am doing my final thesis an the topis is as follows:
“WEB 2.0 AND ITS UTILIZATION IN THE INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL COMMUNICATION OF THE PUBLICLY LISTED COMPANIES IN FINLAND”
I have narrowed the topic by using turnover as a criteria.
I would like to ask you few questions if that is okay with you? I will email you if you give me the permission. Don’t want to bother you with unwanted e-mails.
Thanks,
Olli from Finland
- Final Thesis
2007-11-08 06:33:00 SenSen [Reply | View]Hi Ollie83,
How is your final thesis going? I hope it is going well. I myself am in a thesis concerning web2.0. I wonder if we can contact with each other, telling more about our thesis, and probably share knowledge and resources. Please let me know.Regards,
Sen
- Final Thesis
- Referred to your article
2007-09-11 08:51:15 spetersen [Reply | View]Your article on Web 2.0 serves as a definitional resource for me and has helped me to understand the principals of Web 2.0. The comparison chart and Web As A Platform map are particularly useful.I referenced your name today in an entry on my company’s blog, tying Web 2.0 to the real estate industry. Please view the entry here: http://onboardllc.com/OnBlog/.
Thanks again for writing such a thorough, easy to understand piece on the direction of the Web.
Also, do you have trackback links?
Sarah Petersen
OnBoard LLC
- More Examples of Next Generation Software?
2007-08-24 22:41:27 kcurry [Reply | View]MapQuest -> Google Maps
online communities -> social networks
postal address -> geocode
network backbone -> data and services backbone3rd Generation?
personal web sites -> blogging -> personal publishing
- Hi Tim
2007-08-17 15:09:32 Ingenesist [Reply | View]Not to stray too far from the subject but in financial circles knowledge is tangible only within the constructs of a legal entity such as a corporation. With the convergence of Web 2.0 applications, at what point does knowledge become tangibel (tradeable, financed, capitalized, insureable) outside of the corporate structure. Also, Banks enjoy a multiplier effect – that is, thay can lend the same 100 dollars out 5-7 times as long as they maintain some reserve to service the account. At what point would a multiplier effect on knowledge become the rule rather than the exception?- Hi Tim
2007-09-03 15:36:00 Richard_2 [Reply | View]The multiplier effect of bank lending is something of an illusion: there is only one real ‘100 dollar’ – the others are just paper promises dependent on rather risky cycles, as seen in the current sub-prime mortgage lending fiasco. Knowledge on the other hand – or information or data – can be copied endlessly. That makes it a rather more interesting & potentially valuable resource, it least to the altruistic, than resources such as labour, capital and finance.
- Hi Tim
- But what about???
2007-08-04 14:41:20 Dakz [Reply | View]Great article…but what about when I cannot be connected? Gmail is great, but if I don’t have a connection I can’t do anything with it. I’m trying to find a class of lightweight apps that can perform basic operations and then be web aware when I am back online. Has anyone done anything with that? I can think of lots of applications that today exist as clients that could or should be built with Web 2 tech but they have to provide me some basic off line functions. I should at least be able to author an email and read the email from my last connection while off line.
- Regarding implementing Web 2.0
2007-07-23 03:51:37 Rahul.Pareek [Reply | View]Hi Tim,This is rahul. I want to implement web 2.0 in my preexisting, asp based web site. Can you implement web 2.0 on an asp driven website or I have to migrate to higher version like .net. What are the main features of an web 2.0 implemented site???
- Regarding implementing Web 2.0
2007-09-22 00:08:49 Mirai_Solutions_Phil [Reply | View]ASP is much like PHP and is perfectly capable of generating dynamic content for a Web 2.0 website. To be a Web 2.0 website, the content on your website must be “live”, meaning the content is always changing based upon user interaction or other data changes. You will likely need to implement a database and connect to that data source to provide the dynamic content. There are many examples and tutorials out there to help you learn how to connect to different database types. The simple place to start might possibly be at http://www.w3schools.com/ado/ado_intro.asp
Regards,
Phil Kanaby
- Regarding implementing Web 2.0
- Web 2.0 Dissertation
2007-07-09 15:24:47 Emmorey [Reply | View]What a fascinating and useful article. I am currently creating a Welsh translation web-site for my Cardiff Uni dissertation, and I would like to implement Web 2.0 technologies within the site, and also to study the impact and various definitions of “Web 2.0″. This site has been an excellent starting point and provides many useful links and examples. Would I have permission to quote from the site, obviously citing all quotes to you, Tim O’Reilly, at the correct URL? Also, do you have any personal suggestions of how I could use Web 2.0 in regard to my site? I could also include these suggestions in my dissertation. I am now even more excited about my project! Regards, Emma Garland- Web 2.0 Dissertation
2007-08-01 05:02:38 WEB2.0Dissertation [Reply | View]Hi, Hope you ok. I am doing MSc E Commerce from Westminster University and writing thesis “What is web2.0 and its impact on electronic commerce industry” So i was wondering may be we can discuss further on these issues so can you please contact me on digitalyours20@hotmail.com
Thanks
Regards
Moh
- Web 2.0 Dissertation
- For eduactors
2007-06-25 12:40:20 willsparks [Reply | View]I am a Masters (in Education) Student. I fear incorporating the use of these applications in my classrooms for fear of Bullying. I understand that perhaps you come from a business background, however how do these systems self monitor in a social context so that there is a limit to malicious content?- For eduactors
2007-07-11 08:36:13 Amirhossein [Reply | View]I think much of the ideas presented here has something to do with “collaborative learning”
I am a masters of telecom eng. and currently working on developing intranet applications for the purpose of people learning from people in teaching english as a second language. Try the book linked by Barabasi. It might give you some ideas about the social aspect of the concept web 2.0.- For eduactors
2007-08-31 00:47:21 pageboyz [Reply | View]Im am surely interested in your research regarding collaborative learning.(Search 4 my Facebook profile: Andries du Plessis)
Web 2.0 and the potential for collaboration across vast networks of practice bring about an interesting twist to Wenger’s idea of a community of practice.
Peer-to-peer learning, collaborative learning etc etc are all interesting concepts and with enabling technologies are revitilising the principles of this type of learning.
Would love to hear from you.
A
- For eduactors
- For eduactors
2007-06-29 09:43:44 WingMingChan [Reply | View]I used to teach Chinese, linguistics, and programming (Java, C++, and so on). I would like to share some ideas:- Bullying is inevitable. This is quite like hacking in the technology world. But you can sometimes turn a good hacker to a good programmer. Invite the one who bullies to do something constructive, to help out.
- Expose everything under the sun. When adopting the open source principle in the classroom, every move made by everybody is closely monitored by other students. (This of course includes the instructor.) When someone does something good, it will get appreciation. You should encourage this kind of constructive attitude toward other people. When someone does something bad, everybody can be the judge. The students just need to be encouraged to participate.
- You be the coordinator, not the controller. You don’t monitor all activities. The students do. You don’t provide instructions, at least not explicitly all the time, but suggestions, hints, and guidelines. Let the students, at least every now and then, decide what they want. Just help them see what is best for them.
- Work toward a goal. No matter who is the boss, what atmosphere you want to create, you must have a goal, a target for each class. That is the end. You just need to work out the means to get to that end. Make sure everybody understand what they are trying to achieve.
- You can designate the boss role to students. Ask them to work out a plan for a class. (Do that in advance.) But don’t do any personal favor. Take turns and assign the role to different students at different times.
- Occasionally, you need to remind the students that you are still the final judge. When things get out of hand, you still need to step in and do something. But do this tactfully. When there is a fight (not necessarily in the literal sense), don’t take side. Stay calm, and involve everybody to work together for a solution.
- Keep a few secret weapons up in your sleeves. For example, you can pull a student aside and talk to him/her in private. Understand their problems and help them find a solution. Talk to the parents. Seek help with authorities.
- Kids, at least some of them, are more intelligent than they seem. Sometimes you just need to trust them, and apprciate them. You will be surprised.
- There are so many good teachers out them. Learn from them. Observe, if there are opportunities, how they handle different problems. But remember, students can be good teachers too. Be humble enough to be a student yourself.
- Just two more buzzwords: be flexible, and open-minded. You do your work, and let the students do theirs.
- For eduactors
- Web 2.0 and shareholder value?
2007-06-19 04:01:23 Schmoranz [Reply | View]Dear Mr. O’Reilly,I have a short question:
How can Web 2.0-investments of companies like google or News Corp. raise their shareholder value?Best regards from Cologne in Germany
Alexander Schmoranz
- web 3.0 ’s Effect on web 2.0
2007-06-19 01:17:54 Syth [Reply | View]I have read in some IT magazine that web 3.0 is coming. it is not just the higher version of 2.0 . It is another development on web architecture giving more meaning for content called semantic web, is going to enable computer programs to interact with people and websites.I think there should be a parallel development on both in coming years.
Thanks and Regards
Syth
http://www.sajithmr.com- web 3.0 ’s Effect on web 2.0
2007-07-11 08:24:37 Amirhossein [Reply | View]I do not know what the web 3.0 will be,
But what I am sure, at the moment is that whatever it may mean (probably a higher dimension in human evolution), it will eventually happen through web 2.0;In other words, instead of trying to come up with innovations [thinking inside the box(web 1.0), we should do our best focusing on creating more convenient networks and environments for others to make desired changes (web 2.0 thinking)
- web 3.0 ’s Effect on web 2.0
- The end of the Software Release Cycle?
2007-06-04 22:00:24 mcgmatt [Reply | View]What web have you been surfing for the past 15 years? Even in what I call Web 1.0 and you must call Web 0.0 (the static web with Lynx, Mosaic, and little to no user interaction), the web changed as it needed to change, never in versions.The fact that flickr deploys changes every half hour is unsurprising. If I worked on only one site all day long every day, I would do the same, whether it was me in 1997 or 2007.
If anything, the Software Release Cycle is more prevalent now than it’s ever been. ASP.NET brings hardcore C++ developers into the world of the web, and some of them are so unfamiliar with the web that they build installers to deploy websites. Funny, yet sad.
The word “beta” has caught on because it bears the connotation that if the site breaks, it’s not the developers’ fault for not testing properly, it’s the users’ fault for not exposing the bug earlier. Brilliant.
- The end of the Software Release Cycle?
2007-06-12 17:47:19 -herbO- [Reply | View]I guess I am an old dog. No better, make that a very old, old dog. I used the internet (ARPANET) the first time in 1974. By then it was just three years old. I was with the WWMCCS (World Wide Military Command and Control System) then working out of Germany. I would connect (guess the term today is remote access) to other sites around the world running various applications generating reports using our database and their resources during their slow periods (while they were in their beds sleeping). The term then was ?time-sharing? (think this could be coming back with the creation of ?server farms?). Big processes were broken out to the other sites, returning their results for assembling into a final report or further processing to create a final product. It had wideband, encrypted communication on dedicated communication circuits. I wonder if this could be in the Guinness Record Book for the largest intranet at that time. No, the term intranet was an unknown then, but it appears the internet developed from the intranet and not the other way around. It was here I volunteered to take on the job managing the data with a title of Operator-Analyst (today?s title is DBA). Now everyone confesses to be a DBA after one execution of ?CREATE TABLE.?I left that command in 1980, but rejoined it in 1983 under its new longer name. The abbreviated name was WIC. It was an acronym, with part of its definition already an acronym. The ?W? represented WWMCCS, and IS was the representation of Information System. During this hitch, I volunteered to be the administrator for a computer mail system (email) as no one knew what the job title required. Training was conducted by BBN (Bolt, Beranek and Newman), the project developers. The instructors/trainers were all MIT graduates. I got a very good UNIX education.
Anyway, how can there be version assignments, with such fast changing landscapes. How or when or what triggers the move to the next increment value before and after the ?dot?? The community would be better off as to a timeline form to document it like that at http://www.computerhistory.org/exhibits/internet_history/. Identify the Web as Web2004, Web2005, etc. If you notice, Microsoft uses the decade value for its releases. This way there can be no argument over a silly dot and the numbers surrounding it.
- The end of the Software Release Cycle?
- Web 3.0
2007-04-26 17:59:28 techidude [Reply | View]So how would you define web 3.0 There are many advance user generated content sites like ZCubes (www.zcubes.com) that allows users to create stuff in a very unstructered and powerful fashion. Do they claim right to be a web 3.0 site.
- Thanks, but…
2007-04-07 17:30:26 DMBlackthorn [Reply | View]I think that proper terminology is very important.
A lot of people on the Interweb find this web 2.0 a bit confusing. Why can’t we just call it like it is – the Interweb?
- Wrong term – Stop using it
2007-03-26 10:04:09 meshman [Reply | View]Please stop with the Web 2.0 term. It is entirely inaccurate.The Web is not the content. The web is a delivery platform for content. So by declaring Web 2.0 (how nice of you to do that for everyone), you’re implying there is a whole new level of technology for what we call The Web.
There isn’t. We’re still using IPv4. We’re still using HTML, XML, javascript, PHP and every language we’ve always known for web development. I understand what “Web 2.0″ is but the term is completely wrong for the above reason.
Web 2.0 will be IPv6 and a host of converged, universal development, transport and hosting technologies. Not some social networking paradigm made up by people that don’t understand how the Internet works.
How is Internet banking Web 2.0? When will Microsoft come up with the “Web 2.0 Server”? Will there be a Web 2.0 version of Apache? No, because social networking and user rating aren’t about the technology. They exist because of the technology.
Those of us that actually work with the technology supported by this new paradigm are smacking our collective foreheads. You’re holding up an apple and calling it an orange. Plus to make it worse, you’re being applauded for it by people equally as ignorant about what the Internet is. Apples are not oranges. This social networking paradigm is not the next ‘version of the web’. The term World Wide Web is universal. That which the term Web 2.0 refers to, is not.
I don’t mean this as a troll, I’m speaking from decades of experience in this technology. What you describe is NOT Web 2.0. Please stop corrupting what we all know to be standards and call it something else.
- Wrong term – Stop using it
2007-09-22 01:06:35 Mirai_Solutions_Phil [Reply | View]The use of a “web browser” has solidified that the content is in fact “the web” in the minds of the general public. But not to worry, because the term “internet” generally still refers to all the technological innovations that bring the content of the web to our displays. IPv6 and future developments to the internet will just need to be called Internet 2.0 instead.Web 2.0 isn’t just social networking style websites, it’s about data and content that is always changing and always growing. I tend to look more along the lines of the way the data is handled and modified rather than the content itself, and that has changed. If PHP was used to simply output a dynamic HTML page, the content of that page would remain the same without something to make it change. When PHP is connected to a constantly changing data source like a database, that content can be modified on the fly by whoever is handed the access to it. I believe that level of interactivity seperates the new ways of browsing the web from the old.
Regards,
Phil Kanaby
- Wrong term – Stop using it
2007-04-30 08:19:30 NickC4555 [Reply | View]Web 2.0 is about people, not technology. Sure it needs innovative technologies to facilitate it, but they are just in a support role. meshman’s post is the last gasp of the old technical guard who don’t get that the web has been rested from them and is now a tool for communitities not techies.As was pointed out so eloquently in the Web 2.0 feature on this site, those of us with “decades of experience in this technology” are at a disadvantage, because of the baggage we enter the new world carrying. The winners in this race are already proving to be those organisations that have been designed from the ground up around the new paradigm.
- Wrong term – Stop using it
2007-04-05 18:31:45 sirmeili [Reply | View]I have to completely disagree, though I buy “Application 2.0″ for my computer, it is most probably still written in the same language and requires the same platform to run on (windows,linux,mac,etc), much like web 2.0 requires the same technology (HTML,JS,CSS,etc) to run.The idea of “Web 2.0″ is purely in the implementation of the technologies available, much like when an application increases its version when it finds new ways to implement new features using the same language as the previous version.
And if its not “Web 2.0″ I’d like to know what you call it. The web today is definitely not the same web it was 5, 10, or 15 years ago. It is ever evolving even if the backbone technology stays the same.
- Wrong term – Stop using it
2007-04-03 14:28:13 rimp [Reply | View]web is the web as you say
and 2.0 means second in order NOT second version its just a second heading in a long list of changes
- Wrong term – Stop using it
2007-03-27 02:59:13 STaylor [Reply | View]Oh come on! I think you are being overpedantic. Whilst you are no doubt correct in a narrow techincal sort of a way, we need some sort of phrase to describe the new ways in which the web is now being used.Everyone knows what web 2.0 means and they realise it’s not actually a new technology, but rather a new use of it.
The term is now pretty well established and I very much doubt that your dislike of it will change anything.
- Wrong term – Stop using it
- Web 2.0 Sites
2007-03-18 11:56:09 Amazedsaint [Reply | View]A comprehensive list of web 2.0 site are available athttp://web2trends.blogspot.com/search/label/Web%202.0%20Directory
- wikiArt ??
2007-07-11 15:31:16 Amirhossein [Reply | View]If technology can have a collaboration-oriented meaning why can’t Art, music, thoughts and so forth.If we want to start thinking outside the box of web 1.0, we should shift towards collaborative attidutes rather than individual ones.
we can have collaborative arts as well, a shared inspiration. What if people are to make a drawing rather than a person (isn’t that what wisdom of crowds is about?) or can people contribute melodies to a music track to make a masterpiece??
I am currently giving some thoughts into this, and I am very open to any talks on this. please let me know what you think…
- wikiArt ??
- Translation
2007-03-06 16:08:04 LTC [Reply | View]Hi Tim,This article can be read in 7 different languages. Does the translation occur dynamically when I selected a language or they were translated and stored in those languages.
My reason is I am researching for good, efficient translator which will work just like on this article but dynamically.
Appreciate your feed back.Lan Tran Cao
New York City / Viet Nam
- security and enterprise
2007-03-05 17:33:36 mattburlew [Reply | View]I love the concept of quality web-based software as a service- however, there are legit security concerns here related to enterpise. Do I want my company’s confidential emails stored on google servers? I am not as excited about storing or sending proprietary or federally regulated information outside of my network without absolute control over the protocols it is delivered through or personally holding the lock and key to its storage. I would like to see this addressed in more detail.
- phone apps
2007-03-03 13:09:05 summer_s06 [Reply | View]Do you consider phone app as web 2.0? For example an app that allows you to preview/download simple ringtones but that displays ads while processing the request is more than a simple software. You mentioned that web 2.0 goes beyond PCs but the itunes example still somehow relates to a PC. Can such phone app be called web 2.0?
- Applications v/s Toys
2007-02-21 23:11:16 once:technologies [Reply | View]It may appear to be an extreme position, but with a few notable exceptions, most ‘Web 2.0 applications’ seem to be marginally more than cute software toys.My company – once:technologies – develops fully-functional business process applications entirely within a browser-based application development environment.
We are interested to hear of others operating in this space. All of the examples we’ve seen fit into two categories
- Those that create really cute ‘toys’, not without their place but hardly what could be considered as serious applications.
- Complex technologies that rely on professionals (read expensive) with database, server and web design capabilities.
We would like to collaborate with others developing serious web application technology that does not rely on high levels of IT capability.
- hardware
2007-02-21 17:08:21 invex [Reply | View]we need to re desgine the systems to work with new hardware that works with web 2.0 we can’t rely on old software even if its windows vista. because as it may seem the companys benifit from content ipod worked for music. a web developement machine for different sites every site gets there own hard ware and we can boom economy prices by teaming major corps together like apple and microsoft and sun micosystems together. to create a small device that may use cards to do different things or get diifferent info running on aaa or AA batteries. we need to get rid of the rechargers or create hospital safe batteries and hospital safe hardware those who really need internet are in hospitals those who stay over night and if they have to stay overnight want there info and they can’t.
and the programers have to figure out an out of the box idea for different programing language for each hard ware.
- Utilizing Web 2.0
2007-02-09 03:35:11 Gigahaw [Reply | View]Great article. We are beginning our 2008 strategy planning (yeah, really) and these types of discussions are going on all over our office. I work for a Fortune 500 manufacturing company interested in staying ahead of our competitors via the web. We cannot sell direct in most cases but instead generate demand via the web. We have some interesting flexible design web apps that enable our visitors to interact with our products. Business users want to blog to share and get feedback but I have been warning them that once they start they have to keep at it or it will fail. They are very concerned with negative feedback they might receive. Can you speak to how large companies are working with the need to reach out using blogs and the tension of user comments? Also, can you provide some insight into how larger companies are using Web 2.0 for their businesses?- Utilizing Web 2.0
2007-02-09 07:24:37 timoreilly [Reply | View]Gigahaw –Just look at some of the celebrity CEO bloggers. Jonathan Schwartz at Sun is a great example. He wields it as a powerful marketing tool, getting exposure for his ideas without spending money on advertising. If you have top execs who are willing to speak for the company, this is huge.
But even mid-level people can have a big impact if they are given the freedom to speak their minds (especially if they have useful insights.) Look at the various google blogs — Matt Cutts on search engine optimization, for example. He’s the man, or the voice of the man, on this important topic. It allows google to be in conversation with its advertisers and their opponents.
Another thing to remind your management of is a bit of history. Just remind them when all those arguments were used against the personal computer. IT hated and feared PCs. And sure enough, there were gaffes, when people made bad decisions based on flawed spreadsheet formulas. (There was even a suit against Lotus over a couple of those.) But in the end, the value was too great to ignore.
While blogs et al are now only at leading edge companies, eventually they will be everywhere. So it’s really a matter of now or later, not whether.
As to other aspects of your post — I’m very interested in thinking about applications of Web 2.0 to manufacturing. I’d love it if you’d post a URL for your company, so I can look at the apps you have that let customers interact with your products. You can also send me an email — tim at oreilly.com — if you don’t want to publish that here.
- Utilizing Web 2.0
- Webinale 07 @Singapore
2007-02-01 21:24:18 S&SMedia [Reply | View]Webinale 07 – A Conference For the Next Generation Web
The Web is in motion! It’s about conversations, interpersonal networking, personalization, and individualism. The need for immediacy, interactivity, and community, combined with new and light-weight technologies are changing the social structure of the Web. The Next Generation Web is about getting associated with openness, trust, authenticity and collaboration. Interactivity, new possibilities to connect, social software, usability, and community networking are fast catching up with users. This new buzz is generating fresh and exciting projects. The latest buzzword is Web 2.0, and the event for anyone seeking to stay on top of this buzz is Webinale 2.0!
More info at www.webinale.com
- How Does Web 2.O pertain to service businesses?
2007-01-31 07:12:46 echelini [Reply | View]Great Article,
My question is that all of the companies listed in this article are Internet pure plays (Google, Flikr, etc). What are companies that are not pure plays, but use the Internet to conduct their business, like professional services firms?- How Does Web 2.O pertain to service businesses?
2007-01-31 08:21:12 timoreilly [Reply | View]The key web 2.0 principle to think about is “harnessing network effects to create products or services that get better the more people use them.”So, for a service business, how might you harness network effects?
1. Make it easier for people to sample or recommend your services. What is the equivalent of viral distribution for software?
2. Help your customers to network. Is there some P2P or social networking angle to what you do? (In this context, see wesabe.com (http://www.wesabe.com) , which aggregates consumer spending behavior to build data about popular merchants, how people like you spend their money, as well as letting people share information about their experience with a product or service, and support each other in reaching financial goals. Could a service like Wesabe be useful to your customers?) [Disclosure: I am an investor in Wesabe.] Let them annotate, review, and share information about your product or service. (Amazon is a great company to study in this regard. They don’t have a single big Web 2.0 competitive advantage like Google or EBay — they just work harder than anyone else to involve their customers in adding value to their product.)
3. Build services that learn from your customers. If your product requires configuration or business rules established, document and export the corner cases so that it’s easier for the second customer who encounters the special situation to use your product or service.
4. Read Kathy Sierra’s Creating Passionate Users blog (http://headrush.typepad.com>), and apply her insights.
5. Start your own blog, and follow the principle laid out in The ClueTrain Manifesto that “markets are conversations.”
etc. etc.
Study your own product or service, and think about how networked markets can and should affect it.
- How Does Web 2.O pertain to service businesses?
- great article
2007-01-27 13:16:30 LisaF [Reply | View]I have a job interview at a “web 2.0″ startup next week – I’ll definitely use the list to see if they meet the criteria!Thank you!
- Excellent Article
2007-01-26 15:58:41 excogitator [Reply | View]Had it coming ..
Web 2.0 is a phenomenon which is going to drive the next decade of innovations. Promise you that !
- hey, thanks!
2007-01-26 02:27:56 happiebb [Reply | View]just a quick word of thanks for an excellently written article that answers questions, provides info and stimulates thinking.- web 2.0 and philosophical issues!
2007-07-11 15:15:21 Amirhossein [Reply | View]I really appreciat the discussions that was presented in this article and also the user friendly and convenient question-answer pages.
Thanks again and wish everyone good luck.I think web 2.0 is really the beginning of a big evolution, not just in buisines etc…
but also in people’s mentalities. Looking at everything from a different perspective redefining [or getting closer to the real meaning of] certain words including “unity”, “collaboration”, “fairness”, “the truth” and “people’s rights”.
- web 2.0 and philosophical issues!
- democratization or divide
2007-01-17 16:54:56 Badrirag [Reply | View]Tim,Your article on web 2.0 is a must-read for any existing and aspiring technologist, visionary and entrepreneur. The clarity and the examples are really amazing.
When I wanted to know something about Web 2.0 (sometime y’day afternoon), I thought I may have to spend hours in getting to the core but thanks to your article, I have some understanding pretty fast. Congrats once again.
While it appears that web 2.0 as a platform would foster greater participation of users and facilitate an unprecedented level of user-generated content, the effort required for participation seems staggering and even daunting. Writing a blog is now a child’s play but getting it noticed is becoming tougher and in some cases devious too. Add the dimension of constantly engaging people in conversation (if one is astute enough to start one)and it appears to be a full-time job,out of reach of the common man (or the long tails as popularly known).
And as one needs to be update on the latest trends there is a demand for reading other blogs, facilitated by RSS feeds and services like bloglines. I am reminded of the numerous selections I made while signing up for a Yahoo account a few years ago and then was swamped by the tons of emails offering everything under the sun. I then had to literally unsubscribe to most of those offers and sites. I see a similar trend happening in the blogsphere where people generally subscribe to many blogs (will this happen if content was priced, even a pittance?) and then find that the number of unread posts becomes unwieldy. Presto they click on ‘Mark all Read’ and that is back to square one.
I will take a break now and would really like to have your views.
- Servers
2007-01-08 15:34:39 tgemberl [Reply | View]How can every downloading computer be a server? Doesn’t a server have to be on all the time?
- Web 2.0 Map
2007-01-07 03:37:12 Luca_at_railsonwave [Reply | View]After looking at this post and related articles I have worked on a map of Web 2.0 concepts and terminology. A complete cloud-view of Web 2.0 galaxy with links to Wikipedia sources. The map is in scalable vector graphics (svg) format.This is the resulting map:
http://www.railsonwave.com/assets/2006/12/25/Web_2.0_Map.svgAnd this is the original blog post:
http://www.railsonwave.com/railsonwave/2007/1/2/web-2-0-mapGive me your feedback!
see you,
Luca.
- Have and Have Not
2007-01-06 15:26:07 Stephenmcm [Reply | View]My concern is the roughly 30%+ of populations, even 1st world, that are not literate enought to deal with WWW, web 1.0 or web 2.0.We cannot leave them behind or we will have internecine warfare. What price a PC then?
My challenge is how to engage the least able in our population with the benefits of what you describe. How do we not leave them behind?
Can we utilise the innovation and creativity described to help those less able to move up the food chain?
If not, then we are developing a paradigm of separation that will ultimately do us all no good.
- Have and Have Not
2007-09-19 08:02:16 tobywun [Reply | View]That is an equitable position but I suspect that convergence will allow a different value system to be placed on new technology. Where it is the use of and access to services that enables revenue to be generated, technology becomes the essential gateway and therefore an acceptable cost to industry, (lets face it, it is the existence of a revenue model which has allowed web 1.0 & now web 2.0 to be exploited so effectively). Take cable TV set top boxes for instance, they give them away! While this still relies on an annualised contract for service provision the parallel is pretty good. Also (very different example) Airline operators collaborate and bear the cost of reservation & inventory data processing via co-owned companies such as Gallileo, the cost is bourn by the customer eventually or the airlines take a hit on profit. (This was as an alternative to small travel agencies having to integrate all airlines data on multiple platforms which would have been unmanageable and prohibitively expensive).In terms of individuals with few skills ? web2.0 can represent who ever generates content, service, access and so on (my understanding is that you refer to the lowest common denominator). Or it can be used to target activity where the greatest revenue exists; and where is the biggest market in the world but amongst the uneducated. Also, Judging by mobile phone text language, there are millions of messages that are sent, received and understood by virtually illiterate people every day. Not left behind at all in this context.
With a heavy heart I believe that this is the down side: as with most technologies/ service platforms that trickle to the masses, they do so because the poor, vulnerable and uneducated are the largest market in the world, not because of an altruistic desire for everyone to keep up. Web 2.0 will not leave them behind but will commoditise them even further in exchange for some funky toys and the ability to participate. I hope I am wrong but each of us is already being used/ targeted as a revenue generating asset and our happy surrender of personal data and behaviour does not give us freedom, it simply takes away our power.
Will Web2.0 be the most accessible and greatest entrepreneurial opportunity we have ever seen, or will it be the clarion call for individuals who are desperate to regain their power in a way that the Communist revolutions could have only dreamed about? I can?t wait to see!
For reference I am a Libertarian Anarchist, I know nothing and filter all I see through my beliefs and experience. Not the most reliable opinion as I am sure you will agree
- Have and Have Not
- Quotation
2007-01-05 06:58:01 Wybourne [Reply | View]I am an equity analyst at Charles Stanley, a private client stockbroker based in London and covering only UK stocks in a number of sectors including tech. I would very much like to draw on your article “What is Web 2.0″ . I would propose to include the following: “This note draws heavily, with his permission, on an article publsihed in September 2005 by Tim O’Reilly, an authoritative commentator who coined the phrase Web 2.0 in 2004, and available on http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html?page=1 .”The note would be sent to our clients. It is also distributed to the press, following which you might get a few queries or hits as they may not be fully up to speed. Which you may or may not welcome!
Kind regards
- Great Artical
2007-01-04 11:47:19 Silver_Bullet [Reply | View]This is a fantastic article. It really clarifies my own opinions on how the internet has and will continue to revolutionize our lives. The true potential of open source content is still yet to be appreciated as there are generations that will never embrace IT. As time goes by the internet will become an essential part of everyone?s life as it continues to be enriched by all.
- Brazilian Portuguese Translation
2006-12-29 05:21:42 JulioPreuss [Reply | View]Since there was no Portuguese version of the article yet, I asked a friend to translate it for me and posted it in my blog (http://juliopreuss.com/blog/2006/12/13/o-que-e-a-web-20/) . If anyone else needs it, it can be found at http://juliopreuss.com/blog/2006/12/13/o-que-e-a-web-20/
- Nano-marketing is really born !
2006-12-08 10:07:01 Revgi [Reply | View]Web 2.0 allows the emergence of a new phenomun which I am calling nano-marketing coming directly from the proliferation of nano-publishing tools (blog, flux RSS, Ajax, tag etc?). Have a look in my blog about it http://nano-marketing.viabloga.comMarketing is completely reshuffled, the enterprise too and all of this because the individual can express himself and put in resonence with the web.
This is a fascinating period: we are not substituting anything with these new free energies and these new tools. For me we are just adding a new layer of complexity with which we have to deal… d?aggregating individuel contents that can be isolated or even diverging. The time when one person could be traited in one piece, in one homogeneous bloc is over? really have a look to what I am observing that?s happening !
Cheers,
Gil
- HAVE YOU GOT SOME COMMENT TO MAKE TO WEB2.0
2006-12-06 11:43:25 AXEL [Reply | View]HI everybody,
In association with 12 sutendts of a graduate school of management in FRANCE,we create a blog on the web2.0 in wich you’ve got some informations and few point of view.We try to define the concept…
I invite you to watch the blog and makes some comments about the topic treated.LINKS : http://www.at-ethno.com/le_web2_vu_de_clermont_fe/
Thanks for your time …
- Turkish Translation
2006-11-27 12:06:08 buyruk [Reply | View]I’ve seen that Turkish translation is also missing. I would be happy to make this translation. I am going to start right away as soon as i get the approval.C’ya!
- Is that an web2.0 website?
2006-11-23 10:08:51 webblogger [Reply | View]what do you think, it’s that a web2.0 website? A blog explore service integrated in a blog:www.bloxpo.com
Really a don’t know what exatly mean web2.0, maybe the new websites people-oriented instead of company-oriented.
- Translation problems
2006-11-10 15:16:54 Susanlulee [Reply | View]This is a great article and it’s nice to see that it has been translated into several different languages. The problem is I can hardly understand the Chinese translation, as a native Chinese speaker. It looks like it was translated by machine.
- Great description
2006-11-08 23:44:37 caprisco [Reply | View]A very good detailed study and description on the future of web from an overall software industry prespective and its background and transformation. It also shows the shift of customer needs and the development cycle in the IT arena.Great article overall,
Girish
- document 28 aka RSS feed
2006-10-24 06:31:48 kornbrot [Reply | View]NIce description of many web 2.0 constructs
BUT clicked on RSS feeds and firefox dwonloade a file called ‘28′ without any extentionwindows offered me all of my 100 or so applications as possiblities for opening the file
not an enjoyable or intuitive experience!
best
diana kornbrot
seem to have msipelt my name when chosing a screen name , ah wel……
- Its amaing article..
2006-10-22 12:45:08 Sandeepan [Reply | View]I had a little idea on web 2.0… but not as complete as this article has elaborated…
It has enlighten me new stuffs…
- class
2006-10-18 13:58:10 jtscooter [Reply | View]This article really helped explain what we’re starting to work on in my technology class. Thanks!
- article
2006-10-17 09:45:13 brynniesan23 [Reply | View]great! It was nice to have a “user friendly” article for someone who is computer illiterate. I appreciate that byou highlighted/shed light on all of the technological advances that many of use daily, that have taken place since the dot com crash.
- Travel and web2.0
2006-10-12 06:57:29 Travel20 [Reply | View]looking for interested parties in travel and web 2.0.Mark
- Travel and web2.0
2007-07-14 03:54:54 Amirhossein [Reply | View]I am interested. Mostly in the architecture behind web 2.0 applications. Currently designing a network logic for education purposed “collaborating learning”
- Travel and web2.0
- Web 2.0
2006-10-05 00:08:52 ozzie25 [Reply | View]Although not a teckie, I was fascinated by this article and, for once, went through all five pages without getting side-tracked by the links. Admittedly, there was a lot that I didn’t attempt to understand, but from not even knowing that Web 2.0 even existed I have graduated to a level where I can talk about it. The article has also given me several ideas for my own business. All credit to you.
- Typo 1.0
2006-09-30 07:34:15 DeekDeekster [Reply | View]“What’s more, both TiVo and iTunes show some budding use of collective intelligence, although in each case, their experiments are at war with the IP lobby’s. “Surely you mean “lobbies”?
- Tim O’Reilly’s article from Sept 2005 entitled “What is Web 2.0?”
2006-08-25 04:03:29 jovialameteur [Reply | View]Fascinating article.
The summary, expressed as Core competencies of Web 2.0 companies, seemed to me to be referring to companies whose raison d’etre is the internet, rather than companies offering things or services, which in themselves have nothing to do with the internet, and may already been traded for decades if not centuries.If this was not the intention of the summary, can anyone enlighten me as to where I’m missing the point?
Thanks very much.
- A Missing Feature of Web 2.0
2006-08-18 05:07:24 Ashraful_Alam [Reply | View]A great feature has been missed from Web 2.0 concept, addition of which make Web 2.0 much more popular and useful. Please consider the following link to know more about it: click here (http://geekswithblogs.net/joycsharp/archive/2006/08/18/88368.aspx) .
- Web Services versus Packaged Software
2006-08-18 00:52:51 vnyx [Reply | View]While I agree that Web Services have many advantages to traditional packaged software, there is no reason why newly developed packaged software could not use Web Services.In my opinion, due to inherent problems in Windows, users are reluctant to install package software on there computers for fear that it would harm their system. When I used Windows I felt that fear.
When I switched to Mac OS X, I suddenly found that it was okay to install as many programs as I wanted on the computer without worrying about problems. This was the way it used to be and it made me realize that much of the emphasis on thin-client systems and web services may be in part due to this installation fear in Windows.
The focus today is to make the browser do everything and the challenge is to make the browser measure up to packaged software.
Web 3.0 may be the emergency of packaged software to utilize web services “instead” of a browser, but this if dependent on Windows Vista giving users the freedom to install programs without fear.
- Web 2.0 for Libraries
2006-08-17 06:21:42 ArvindBhadrashetty [Reply | View]Great Article! How can Web 2.0 be best utilized for libraries and providing information services.Regards
Arvind
- Great Article
2006-08-01 20:41:39 LizWaldner [Reply | View]Cheers from
Liz Waldner 2.0
www.lizwaldner.wordpress.com
- Jargon, Learning & Examples
2006-07-09 09:45:59 RayRasmussen [Reply | View]Nice article on Web 2.0, thanks. I would suggest that you add examples. You’re using a lot of jargon which goes right by people like me.
- china web2.0 list
2006-07-03 06:32:41 chinaseo [Reply | View]china web2.0 list:
http://www.weblist.cnVery good!
- Upgrade to Web 2.1
2006-05-26 10:25:52 jeremy4321 [Reply | View]I hope to upgrade to web 2.1 so that I don’t get sued for trademark violations.I am referring to O’Reilly’s legal department suing someone for trademark infringement on the Web 2.0 trademark.
I really hope that O’Reilly Networks clears up the trademark issues with Web 2.0. If anyone should own the trademark to Web 2.0, it should be Google, since they are the banner carriers for the thing. In any case, I am not a lawyer and I really don’t care beyond the incidental humor of lawyers seemingly trying to make a buck.
- Upgrade to Web 2.1
2006-05-26 12:48:18 jeremy4321 [Reply | View]That said, it must be frustrating to have all this bad press. The quadry as I see it is that you can’t have unauthorized JavaOne, Comdex, or CES conventions going around, so why is it a big deal to limit Web 2.0 conferences.Well, I think the difference is in the title. Comdex, JavaOne, and CES are unique names. Web 2.0 seems like more of a standard, which shouldn’t be trademarked. It would seem to me like saying that AJAX or HTML or WWW could be trademarked or something.
I do realize that there are differences but when you take some industry word or phrase and slap a version number on it, expect trademark confusion (e.g. AJAX 2.0, Browser 2.0, Operating System 2.0, Firewall 2.0).
- Upgrade to Web 2.1
- Cutting Edge
2006-05-16 09:47:46 inthemiddle [Reply | View]Stumbling upon this site today for the first time and read an excellently written article on WEB2.0.With so many badly written articles on the web I am so impressed with the accuracy and diversity of the info on this site. Added it to favorites and will be visiting it everyday.
- Core Competencies of Web 2.0 companies
2006-04-29 14:56:12 ibl [Reply | View]It’s good to see a succinct description of core
competencies, so that one can evaluate the claims of folks who use “Web 2.0″ for marketing.Although we don’t use the “Web 2.0″ label(yet),
we were gratified to find that our
Internet Business Logic (R) system appears to have
the seven core competencies that Tim describes at
the end of the article.The system is a sort of Wiki for executable content in *open vocabulary* English. (Not
yet another controlled vocabulary system). It’s online at reengineeringllc.com, and shared use is free.Please try it, and send feedback to ibl@snet.net.
Thanks!
- German Translation
2006-04-27 05:30:58 Holyfive [Reply | View]Hello,I’m currently working on my dissertation about Web Services and Web 2.0 and just read this excellent and directiongiving article. Congratulations.
I noticed that there’s no German translation available. May I translate it and publish the German version on my site, of course with a big reference to this original article?
- Web2.0 Business Model Health Checker
2006-04-26 05:47:21 Alex.Osterwalder [Reply | View]This is an excellent article on a very exciting topic. However, I think many of the current mushrooming web2.0 services and business models should go for a rapid and simple health check
http://business-model-design.blogspot.com/2006/04/simple-web20-business-model-health.html
Cheers from a “springly” Lausanne, Switzerland, Alex
- Web 2.0 Article
2006-04-17 06:26:09 ub40 [Reply | View]Its an excellent article by Tim O’Reilly. I am a software developer with relatively little web-based/enabled systems development experience but I can see web 2.0 patterns apply and contributed to the success of traditional device-based distributed applications as well. Interoperability and extensibility of tiers in data dependant (web) applications will ensure dynamic and competitive services based on these applications.
- I think these principles work a lot better if you change the order ..
2006-04-17 03:05:55 AjitJaokar [Reply | View]Hello all
I have used these principles extensively in my work on mobile web 2.0 and they are great. However, I have never quite understood why they are in the same order as they are .. In fact, I think the second principle ‘Harnessing collective Intelligence’ encapsulates all the rest. See my thoughts herehref=”http://opengardensblog.futuretext.com/archives/2006/04/tim_o_reillys_s.html”> The seven principles of web 2.0 make a lot more sense if you change the order
Kind rgds
Ajit- sorry .. did not enter link in previous post correctly ..
2006-04-17 03:08:45 AjitJaokar [Reply | View]Here we go again!Hello all
I have used these principles extensively in my work on mobile web 2.0 and they are great. However, I have never quite understood why they are in the same order as they are .. In fact, I think the second principle ‘Harnessing collective Intelligence’ encapsulates all the rest. See my thoughts herehttp://opengardensblog.futuretext.com/archives/2006/04/tim_o_reillys_s.html
Kind rgds
Ajit
- sorry .. did not enter link in previous post correctly ..
- The Best of web 2.0
2006-04-16 11:33:12 toobew [Reply | View]Check out koolweb2.comBest of Web 2.0 sites ranked by actual users. Drag & drop sites to desired spot in the list and submit rankings. Overall rankings reflect cumulative average of all user submissions. Recommend a new site as well..
- Web2.0 Business Model Characteristics
2006-03-30 07:46:10 Alex.Osterwalder [Reply | View]This evening I sat down to do some brainstorming on Web2.0 Business Model Characteristics. The reflections are based on Tim’s great posting and some other texts…The outcome is a short blogposting with mindmap image at:
http://business-model-design.blogspot.com/2006/03/web20-business-model-characteristics.html
- Whats inside Web 2.0 ?
2006-03-14 01:38:08 Anders_Carlsen [Reply | View]In my opinion its “Open Source Movement InSide”. Because its the one big factor that have changed the Internet and makes me wants to “put my shares” on Web 2.0.
- Web2.0 Validator
2006-02-27 04:21:01 ArjenP [Reply | View]Take nothing for granted! Check out Web2.0 Validator at www.web20validator.com.
- good!`
2006-02-25 04:10:13 kenyguam [Reply | View]Mr. O’Reilly:excellent article!
can I translate it into Chinese?Simplified?
thank you!
- Chinese Translation
2006-02-09 10:51:20 golim [Reply | View]Hi Jimmy,Apparently, some folks saved you the trouble of translating. Here is where you can access a Chinese translation of this article:
http://www.enet.com.cn/article/2005/1122/A20051122474593.shtmlEnjoy,
Goli
- good introduce
2006-02-08 19:18:18 Jimmy.ZHAO [Reply | View]Can I translate this article to Chinese?Jimmy
<link>http://itperson.blogspot.com</link>
- Excellent Matter on Web 2.0
2006-02-01 00:31:11 EldoItteera [Reply | View]<br/>
I felt that this is very excellent matter on Web2.0 especially in the scenario where ,most of the products are consumed as services rather than applications or components. Its true that Google has added a lot of new things to Web 2.0.Lets wait and watch for what next!!!
<br/>
<br/>Eldo Itteera
WeServices Center of Excellence
Infosys Technlogies Ltd.
- Value of software
2006-01-15 05:37:03 Teun [Reply | View]I took the liberty to take one of Tim’s statments from the paragraph ‘the web as a platform’ and rewrote it to: ?The value of the software is proportional to the scale and dynamism of the data it helps to manage, and to the richness of the user experience and the amount of satisfaction it offers.?I think this ‘definition’ almost covers the whole Web 2.0 concept. Please comment.
Regards, Teun
- Web 2.0 Article By Tim O’Reilly
2006-01-08 09:52:47 RFHJ [Reply | View]Slammin’ article, Tim! Insightful, lucid, and well cross-referenced to pertinent, supporting articles.I’m on the “guru” team at my shop and will forward the URL to my CIO and walk up the hall to tell him in person that this is a presentation he NEEDS to see.
- Great article! Need a similar one for comparing Web 1.0 vs 2.0 business models
2006-01-03 23:30:32 Usha_K [Reply | View]I’ve spent the last 10 years in the Enterprise Infrastructure (read J2EE, ESBs, BPM) world servicing classic large-scale IT enterprises. I found your article on Web 2.0 quite refreshing and lucid, especially in understanding how our traditional software building, bundling and collaboration paradigms compare to the emerging next-generation software paradigms.What is additionally interesting for me, however, is to know how the business models compare for Web 1.0 versus Web 2.0 – with respect to the past failures and successes, and emerging next-gen business models.
- Organic Design & Web 2.0
2006-01-01 19:06:38 iangilman [Reply | View]Beautiful piece!In one of your sidebars you mention Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language. I’d like to add that A Pattern Language was published almost 30 years ago, and Christopher Alexander has continued to do interesting work in that time. He has recently published a four-part series entitled The Nature of Order in which he argues for, and presents concepts relevant to, a more organic design process — something very much in tune with Web 2.0.
A recent post of mine inspired by his and others’ work in the area:
http://www.iangilman.com/blog/2005/12/organic-design.php
- just a contribution
2005-12-13 17:43:37 GiselaGiardino [Reply | View]Hi Tim,I am happy to have come to this article as I was needing to hear from *you* what the concept ‘web 2.0′ means. It is clear enough to me, despite I may discuss some minor details. But it?s of no importance. I just wanted to contribute here one variable that I consider crucial to understand the whole phenomena, and unless I have overseen it -possible-, it is not mentioned in the article. What made possible the transition from web 1.0 to web 2.0? The changes, widening and improvements on the ISPs, the Internet connections.
It looks like old-school companies and softwares were blind about what looks so obvious today under the lens of web 2.0 builders, this is: The concept of Internet as a Community. Years ago, and not too many this was, I think, envisioned but yet the connectivity of the net couldn?t make it possible.
So software companies and incoming Internet services companies (say Netscape) were driven to build applications intended for users who were not connected to the internet but for about a couple of hours a day and were on poor Dial-up.
The advantages of high-speed connectivity through broadband wi-fi and other(?)
connections made possible an Internet usage on realtime: phonecalls, chat, downloads, uploads, roleplay games, online creation, blogsphere, p2p share, dommestic computers as servers… and several other possibilities you think of. *There* is where Web 2.0 -I believe- was born as a tangible reality.Google APIs, Yahoo?s, P2Ps, Napter, BitTorrent, Skype… all of them are based in the fact high-speed connectivity of the critical mass of users. Actually you are mentioning that BitTorrent feeds itself from the share each new user brings.
Maybe this is not treated seriouly as a variable for the business, but I think it is a subtle yet concrete booster of all this massive change.
Ok, enough. I would go further, but I know you understand my point. I just wanted to contribute to the article with this, that I think it is important to understand -too- why Web 1.0 companies had one business model (based on treating each computer as a standalone entity), and why the transition to web 2.0 happens when companies *can* treat computers as nodes from a network -can expect them connected 24/7-.
The difference between a sum of elements and a community of them, is the -level of- connection between them. We are highly interconnected now => We are working on Web 2.0. I *love* that. I am a humble missionary of this movement. Too. Thank you, Tim.
Gisela
Yer Alieness |-)
- What is Web 2.0
2005-10-26 05:14:29 perfected [Reply | View]Hi Tim, as I mentioned on radar, I do not believe that Web 2.0 is about user interfaces, but rather making it easier for applications to understand other applications.For this reason, I dont believe that Flickr is a Web 2.0 application. A Web 2.0 application is one that does a small task and does it well, then it is re-used (a bit like using standard libraries in development). A great example of this is Salesforces’ AppExchange.
I describe more of my point of view as well as examples in my post What Does Web 2.0 Mean for Business (http://www.nik.com.au/archives/2005/10/26/what-web-20-means-for-business/)
- What is Web 2.0
2006-09-03 11:39:26 abulhaaris [Reply | View]“A Web 2.0 application is one that does a small task and does it well, then it is re-used”.It is interesting that this how Unix applications and shell’s ability to setup pipes between applications (as unix processes) were characterised. Each unix application did something small and did it well. Then, using a simple mechanism of linking the byte stream output of one to the byte stream input of another made beautiful macro applications that could carry out remarkable tasks in concert. I claim that Web 2.0 dates back to the Unix (or perhaps Multics). MacOS and Windows brought GUI but they forced us to work in an environment of standalone applications. Applications could not be married together using simple bonds. I never expected OLE to be glue that could hold multiple applications together.
- What is Web 2.0
2005-11-07 06:19:28 minoopy [Reply | View]Response to this comment and “Knowledge as the next ‘Next Intel Inside’” from Tim Finin.As described in this comment, web 2.0 should make applicaitons understand each other. Is it too fast for the Web to develop at the current stage? Borrowing the comments from Tim Finin in his Knowledge as the next ‘Next Intel Inside’, with RDF data standards was fully recommended above XML/XSLT within the Web 2.0 era, the semantics between the applications could be built up, since then the real “understanding” between the applications could be stated.
This is purely my personal view point. Welcome all kinds of comments!
- What is Web 2.0
2005-10-26 17:29:41 timoreilly [Reply | View]Maybe you don’t know, then, about the Flickr API, which makes it easy to reuse the flickr database in other applications. That’s part of what has made it a web 2.0 poster child with lots of innovation and re-use. Google for instance for the Flickr color picker…
- What is Web 2.0
- Japanese Localize
2005-10-16 07:26:52 huehara88 [Reply | View]Please permit my Japanese localization of this Article.
If not, let me know.http://ceonews.jp/archives/2005/10/web20_7map.html
- FolkMind ? a killer app for the Web 2.0 era
2005-10-15 13:33:08 GeorgeChiramattel [Reply | View]Hi,
First of all let me congratulate you on this beautiful article.I would also like to add to this discussion.<br/>
If the Internet represents the ‘collective intelligence of humanity’ then in my opinion we require better tooling to utilize it. I wouldn’t expect the ‘virtual brain of humanity’ to come with a ’search box’ as its primary interface At the following URL, I have described how we can build a better tool to handle the huge volume of information that is getting published on the net. I call this tool FolkMind.
http://www.chiramattel.com/george/blog/2005/10/14/folkmind_a_killer_app_for_the_1.html
- Interesting Mathematical Definition of Web 2.0
2005-10-13 09:50:37 Owen [Reply | View]In our complexity group, Friam.org, we’ve been discussing whether or not there is an emergent property to Web 2.0. One contender is Reed’s Law
http://www.reed.com/dprframeweb/dprframe.asp?section=gfnBasically a component of Web 2.0 is migration from “Metcalfe’s Law” and “Reed’s Law”. Metcalfe’s law states the value of a network varies as the number of pair-wise connections between nodes, (the complete graph of the nodes). This varies as n^2.
Reed’s law states the value of a network varies as the number of subgroups within that network. This varies as 2^n, a much, much larger number.
This transition is occurring due to the migration of the web from a publishing technology to a community.
A good article on the idea is “That Sneaky Exponential?Beyond Metcalfe’s Law to the Power of Community Building”
http://www.reed.com/Papers/GFN/reedslaw.htmlOwen
- Web 2.0 v. Web 1.0
2005-10-13 01:41:51 joelcere [Reply | View]The evolution to Web 2.0, for lack of a better term is about attitude and expectation. Whether it is technology that led to a change of attitude, or that a shift in our relation to the web led to new technology is an academic debate which I will leave to the more technically endowed.In the 90s, the web was driven by companies seeking to turn it into a giant shopping mall. Consumers are now reclaiming the web for what it was intended for: a collective space bringing people together so that they could share experience and information. Just picture this: a collection of mega websites competing to attract eyeballs v. loose networks accessible by search engines, tags and connections where you can share information, engage in conversations and co-create. I am caricaturing here but the change is quite noticeable…
This is how I understand it: Web 2.0. is a different way of looking at the web.
Joel
http://beyondpr.blogspot.com
- Napster – The inside story
2005-10-04 11:23:18 DonDodge [Reply | View]The original Napster was a Web 2.0 style company, back in the 1.0 world. We were too far ahead of the curve (business and legal) to make it a successful business. I just did a post “Napster- the inside story” that gives an insiders view of what we were trying to do and what went wrong. You can see it here
http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2005/10/napster_the_ins.html
- Business Applications
2005-10-04 08:28:32 DemianE [Reply | View]What’s missing in the article is a discussion about true apps on the web. Where does Salesforce fit in? Netsuite? Oracle OnDemand? Employease? They are not “consumer sites” like yahoo and google and wikipedia – they are not advertising driven…could they be? How do the economics work when you have 50,000 users instead of 50,000,000?I must admit I’ve been wondering about the “free software” mindset that is funded by other means, but I have yet to have an aha moment. Perhaps there is a new model that will fly…
Demian Entrekin
http://www.projectarena.com
- Also check out: Putting some meat on the Web 2.0 bones.
2005-10-03 23:31:04 hypermark [Reply | View]For what it’s worth, I have written a few posts that attempt to make sense of the WHAT, WHY and HOW of Web 2.0, the most recent of which is called, “Putting some meat on the Web 2.0 bones.” If interested in such things, check it out:http://thenetworkgarden.blogs.com/weblog/2005/09/putting_some_me.html
- an analogy to P2P
2005-10-03 14:46:31 herman@cs.uiowa.edu [Reply | View]I’m teaching currently from a book “Content Networking” and I notice that the authors classify all the following under the topic “P2P Systems”:- File Sharing (Napster, Gnutella, Chord, etc)
- Collaboration (Groove, Magi, AIM, etc)
- Distributed Computing (SETI@home, Gnome@home, etc)
- Platforms (JXTA, .NET, etc)
I contend that it’s more that these things came to prominence at the same time (i.e. zeitgeist) rather than some well-defined, technical commonality forming this group of terms.
Similarly, I look at the big bunch of stuff that Tim agglomerates into the topic “Web 2.0″ and see more zeitgeist than sharp concept delineation. So maybe Web 2.0 is just Web 2005? If so, then I look forward to Web 2.1.3.12.
- Ajax-style Catalog Demo
2005-10-03 08:31:41 AbaqueInside [Reply | View]Here is an example of what Ajax concept may bring in the area of catalogs, IOW large database browsing applications.
http://www.abaqueinside.com/IntuiCatAjaxDemoVerif.asp
currently in french, but fairly intuitive)Thierry Nivelet
- Way of
2005-10-02 16:59:48 netsql2 [Reply | View]So you say..evite –> upcoming.org
means web2.0?
You are way of. Web2.0 is not incrmental!
Check out roomity.com, that is web 2.0.
.V
http://roomity.com
- Knowledge as the next “Next Intel Inside”
2005-10-02 15:37:47 finin [Reply | View]While the use of RDF is not part of the current Web 2.0 model, I’m hopeful that it will develop a key role, especially for web applications that want to flexibly import and export data and knowledge to other applications on the web. Since the current model makes use of data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT and , asynchronous data retrieval via XMLHttpRequest the pathway is there for the data to be expressed in RDF’s XML encoding. — Tim Finin, http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/
- Missing Link? and a Great ThankYou
2005-10-02 06:08:44 RandomProp [Reply | View]Wonderful article. Very clarifying, even for a novice such as myself. Thank you so much.Question: Is there a missing link at bottom of p.2, section 2, last bullet on peer-production where you write “There are more than 100,000 open source software projects listed on (???).“?
Where (???) are these software projects listed? Thanks again for an illuminating article.
- Tim O’Reilly 为 Web 2.0 正本清源
2005-10-02 01:25:55 errorter [Reply | View]http://slashdotcn.org/article.php/2005100211271692
- As simple as possible and no simpler
2005-10-01 02:02:03 jbond [Reply | View]One key factor in all this is APIs and Data formats that are as simple as possible and no simpler. That’s:-
- REST not XMLRPC, XMLRPC not SOAP, SOAP, not WS*
- RSS, not custom XML schema, Simple XML schema not obfuscated RDFhttp://ww.voidstar.com
- As simple as possible and no simpler
2005-10-01 10:10:14 timoreilly [Reply | View]Julian — I completely agree. I wrote “lightweight programming models” but I should have used your formulation. It’s central to the success of the internet as a whole.I remember bringing Fred Baker, the chair of the IETF, to the second open source summit, and asking him what advice he could give to the Open source community, and it was essentially what you said above: standardize as little as possible, just enough to ensure interoperability.
- As simple as possible and no simpler
I thoroughly enjoyed this article by Tim O?Reilly however Web 2.0 is not a new social order for many of us have already been thinking that way for a very long time.