Traduzione Berlini
Alberto
06/08/2006
Lo scoppio della bolla delle dot.com nell'autunno del 2001 ha marcato un punto di svolta per il web. Molte persone concludono che il web era sovrastimato, quanto poi, nei fatti, le bolle e le conseguenti terremoti appaiono essere una caratteristica comune di tutte le rivoluzioni tecnologiche. Le esplosioni tradizionalmente contrassegnano il punto in cui una tecnologia innovativa è pronta per prendere il suo posto al centro della scena. I pretendenti stanno dando il colpo di coda, mentre le storie di vero successo mostrano cioè che separa gli uni dagli altri.
Il concetto di Web 2.0 inizia con un covengno fra O'Reilly e MediaLive International. Dale Dougherty, pioniere del web e O'Reilly VP, notò che, lontano dall'aver avuto un crash, il web era molto più importante che mai prima di allora, con nuove entusiasmanti applicazioni e una sorprendente regolarità nella creazione di nuovi siti. In più, le compagnie che erano sopravvissute al crollo avevano alcune cose in comune. Potrebbe essere stato, il crollo delle dot-com, un momento di svota per il web, come una chiamata all'azione a cui il "Web 2.0" poteva dare senso? Noi fummo d'accordo, e così nacque la Web 2.0 Conference.
Da un anno il termine Web 2.0 ha chiaramente preso piede, con più di 9 milioni e mezzo di citazioni in Google. Ma c'è ancora una enorme quantità di disaccordo su cosa Web 2.0 significhi, con alcune persone che lo denigrano ad una trovata di marketing, altre che lo accettano come una nuova saggezza convenzionale.
Questo articolo vuole chiarire cosa significhi Web 2.0.
Nel nostro iniziale brainstorming, abbiamo formulato la nostra percezione del Web 2.0 con un esempio:
| 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 |
La lista continuava. Ma che cosa ci consentiva di identificare una applicazione o un approccio come Web 1.0 o 2.0? Iniziamo a spiegare quei principi che sono dimostrati dalle storie di successo del Web 1.0 e da quelle più interessanti delle nuove applicazioni..
Come molti concetti importati il Web 2.0 non ha un confine fisso, ma piuttosto un centro gravitazionale. Si può visualizzare il Web 2.0 come una serie di principi e pratiche che si legano insieme ad un vero e proprio sistema solare di siti che dimostrano alcuni o tutti quei principi, a varie distanze dal centro.
La Figura 1 mostra una "meme map" del Web 2.0 sviluppata in un convegno durante l'FOO Camp, una conferenza all'O'Reilly Media. E' un lavoro in realizzazione, ma mostra le maggiori delle idee che si irradiano dal centro del Web 2.0.
Per esempio alla prima Web 2.0 conference, nell' Ottobre 2004, John Battelle e io compilammo una lista dei principi base per il discorso di apertura. Il primo di questi principi era la considerazione del " web come una piattaforma". In quel momento, quello che era una canzonatura del Web 1.0, il caro Netscape, venne giù in fiamme dopo lo scontro con Microsoft. C'era di più. Due dei nostri esempi iniziali di Web 1.0, DoubleClick e Akamai, erano entrambi pionieri nel trattare il web come una piattaforma. Le persone non pensano spesso di questo come un "web services", ma nei fatti, il servizio pubblicitario era il primo servizo web, e il primo "mashup", vastamente sviluppato. Ogni banner pubblicitario è presentato come una cooperazione senza giunture fra due siti, distribuendo e integrando pagine a un lettore su un altro computer. Anche Akamai tratta il network come una piattaforma, ed a un livello più profondo, costruendo un deposito trasparente e una rete di consegna dei contenuti che allevia la congestione della banda-larga.
Sia DoubleClick che Akamai erano pionieri del Web 2.0, tuttavia noi possiamo anche vedere come sia possibile realizzare maggiori possibilità abbracciando Web 2.0 design patterns aggiuntivi.
Se Netscape era l'elemento standard del Web 1.0, Google lo è certamente per il Web 2.0.
Netscape considerò il "web come una piattaforma" nei termini del paradigma dei vecchi software: il loro prodotto portabandiera era il web browser, una applicazione desktop, e la loro strategia era di usare la loro posizione dominante sui mercati browser per stabilire per prodotti server dagli alti prezzi. Il controllo sugli standard per visualizzare i contenuti e le applicazioni nel browser avrebbero dato, in teoria il tipo di potere di mercato raggiunto da Microsoft nel mercato dei PC. Molto come "le carrozze senza cavalli" considerano l'automobile come un amico intimo, Netscape promuove un "webtop" per rimpiazzare il desktop, e pensano di popolare questo webtop con aggiornamenti di informazioni e applicazioni messe nel webtop da providers di informazioni che vorrebbero acquistare i servers di Netscape.
Infine, sia i web browsers sia i web servers finiscono con l'essere prodotti e valori "up the stack" consegnati dal server sulla piattaforma web.
Google, al contrario, iniza la sua vita come una applicazione web, mai venduta o impacchetta, ma consegnata come un servizio, con un pedaggio del consumatore, diretto o indiretto. Nessuna delle trappole del vecchio sistema era presente. Nessun rilascio di un software, ma solo uno sviluppo continuo. Nessuna licenza o vendita, solo usufrutto. Nessuna virata verso differenti piattaforme così che i clienti possano usare il software sul proprio equipaggiamento, solamente una collezione di commodity per il PC usabili in forma open source, più una serie di applicazioni e utilities fatte in casa che nessuno aveva mai visto.
In fine, Google richiede una competenza di cui Netscape non aveva mai avuto bisogno: l'amministrazione del database. Google non è solamente una collezione di strumenti-software, ma è un database specializzato. Senza i dati, gli strumenti sono inutili; senza software, i dati sono ingestibili. Autorizzazioni software e controllo sulle API - il livello del potere nell'era precedente - è irrilevante perchè il software non ha mai avuto bisogno di essere distribuito, ma solo eseguito, e anche senza l'abilità di collezionare e gestire i dati, il software è di poco uso. Infatti, il valore del software è proporzionale alla scala e al dinamismo dei dati che aiutano la gestione.
Il servizio di Google non è un server - sebbene sia consegnato da una massima collezione di internet servers - e nemmeno un browser - sebbene sia usato dall'utente attraverso il browser- . Ne il servizio di ricerca, che ne è il portabandiera, sia mai stato ospite dello stesso servizio. Molto simile ad una telefonata, che avviene non soltanto nei telefoni ad entramni i lati della conversazione, ma nel network che vi è in mezzo, Google esiste nello spazio tra il browser e il motore di ricerca e il contenuto nel server di destinazione, come un enabler o un intermesiario fra l'utente e la sua esperienza online.
Mentre sia Netscape che Google potrebbero essere descritti come aziende del software, è chiaro che Netscape sia appartenuta allo stesso mondo del software world come Lotus, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, e altre compagnie che cominciarono durante la rivoluzione del software del 1980, mentre i colleghi di Google sono altre applicazioni Internet come eBay, Amazon, Napster, ma anche, DoubleClick e Akamai.
Come Google, DoubleClick è un vero figlio dell'era internet. Esso imbriglia il software come un servizio, ha competenza centrale nella gestione dei dati, e, come notato prima, era un pioniere dei pionieri del web services molto prima che i web services even avessero un nome. Tuttavia, DoubleClick è stato ultimamente limitato dal suo modello di business. Introdusse negli anni '90la nozione che il web riguardasse la pubblicazione e non la partecipazione; che i pubblicitari e non i consumatori , debbano cogliere nel segno; che l'ampiezza ha importanza, e che Internet stava incominciando ad essere dominato dai i migliori siti web come dalle misurazioni di MediaMetrix e altre da altre compagnie pubblicitarie di successo.
Come risultato, DoubleClick orgogliosamente cita sul suo sito web "over 2000 successful implementations" del proprio software. Yahoo! Search Marketing (formalmente Overture) e Google AdSense, al contrario, già serve centinaia di migliaia di advertisers apiece.
Il successo di Overture e Google' viene da una ricezione di cio che Chris Anderson chiama "the long tail," il potere collettivo dei piccoli siti che fanno la massa dei contenuti web. L'offerta di DoubleClick richiede un contratto formale di vendita, limitando il proprio mercato a poche centinaia dei più grandi siti web. Overture e Google compresero come consentire il posizionamento della pubblicità alla virtualità in ogni sito web. C'è di più, essi evitarono publisher/agenzie di pubblicità formati pubblicitari friendly come banner pubblicitari e popups in favore di avvisi testuali minimamente intrusivi consumer-friendly, sensibili al contesto.
La lezione del Web 2.0: l'influsso customer-self service e la gestione algoritmica dei dati per raggiungere l'intero web, fino ai margini e non solo il centro, fino alla lunga coda e non solo la testa.
Una Piattaforma Sconfigge una Applicazione Ogni VoltaIn tutti i suoi passati confronti con i rivali, Microsoft ha giocato con successo la carta della piattaforma, giocando l'asso anche dell'applicazione dominante. Windows ha permesso a Microsoft di rimpiazzare Lotus 1-2-3 con Excel, WordPerfect con Word, e Netscape Navigator con Internet Explorer. Questa volta, tuttavia, lo scontro non è fra una piattaforma e una applicazione, ma tra due piattaforme, ognuna con un modello di business radicalmente differente: da una parte, un fornitore di un singolo software, con una base massivamente installata ed un sistema operativo strettamente integrato e in cui le Api danno il controllo sul paradigma di programmazione; dall'altra parte un sitema senza un proprietario, tenuto insieme da una serie di protocolli, standards e contratti aperti per la cooperazione. Windows rappresenta il pinnacolo dei proprietari di software con API controllate. Netscape provò a strappare il controllo a Microsoft usando le stesse tecniche che Microsoft stesso aveva usato contro i propri rivali, e fallì. Ma Apache, che sosteneva il principio degli standard aperti per il web, prosperò. La battaglia non è più ineguale, una piattaforma contro una singola applicazione, ma una piattaforma contro un'altra piattaforma, con l'incognita di quale piattaforma, e più profondamente, di quale architettura, e quale modello di business, sia migliore per le opportunità future. Windows è stata una soluzione brillante per i problemi della precedente età dei PC. Esso ha livellato il campo di gioco per i sviluppatori di applicazioni, risolvendo una grande quantità di problemi che ne avevano precedentemente ostacolato l'operosità. Ma un singolo approccio monolitico, controllato da un singolo venditore, non è più una soluzione, ma un problema. I sistemi communications-oriented, come l'internet-as-platform è certamente, richiedono interoperabilità. Finché un venditore può controllare entrambi i capi di ogni interazione, la possibilità degli utenti di software API controllate sono limitate. Tutti i venditori Web 2.0 che tentano di rinchiudersi nei guadagni delle loro applicazioni controllando la piattaforma, per definizione, non usano più la forza della piattaforma. Ciò non per dire che non ci siano opportunità e vantaggi competitivi per i software bloccati, ma noi crediamo che essi non siano da essere trovati. C'è un nuovo gioco, e le compagnie che verranno nell'era del web 2.0 saranno quelle che capiranno le regole del gioco, invece di provare a tornare indietro alle regole dell'era dei software per PC. |
Non sorprendentemente, altre storie di successo del web 2.0 dimostrano lo stesso carattere. eBay consente transazioni occasionali anche solo di pochi dollari tra singoli individui, recitando come un intermediario automatizzato. Napster (sebbene chiuso per ragioni legali) costruì la propria rete (network) senza costruire un database di canzoni centralizzato, ma architettando un sistema così che ogni downloader diventi a sua volta un server, e ciò fa crescere il network.
Come DoubleClick, Akamai è ottimizato per lavorare con la testa, non con la coda, con il centro, non con le estremità. Mentre serve i benefici degli individui ai margini del web, spianando gli accessi ai siti ad alta richiesta al centro, colleziona le proprie revenue da quei siti centrali.
BitTorrent, atri pionieri del movimento P2P [peer to peer], coglie un approccio radicale alla decentralizzazione di Internet. Ogni cliente è anche un server; i file sono suddivisi in frammenti che possono provenire da molteplici localizzazioni, trasparentemente collegati il network di coloro che scaricano (downloaders) per fornire banda e dati agli altri clienti. Il file più popolare è anche quello che nei fatti è il più veloce ad essere scaricato, poiché ci sono più utenti che forniscono banda e frammenti del file completo.
Cio che BitTorrent dimostra è il principio chiave del Web 2.0: il servizio diventa automaticamete diventa migliore quanto da più persone è usato (the service automatically gets better the more people use it). Mentre Akamai deve aggiungere servers per migliorare il servizio, ogni cliente BitTorrent porta la sua personale risorsa alla "festa". C'è una implicita "architettura di partecipazione", una costruzione di etica cooperazione, in cui il server recitata primariamente come un investitore intelligente, connettendo i margini tra loro e legando il potere degli utenti a se stessi.
Il principio centrale dietro il successo dei giganti nati nell'era del Web 1.0 e sopravvissuti per guidare l'era del Web 2.0 sembra essere che essi abbiano afferrato il potere del web di sfruttare l'intelligenza collettiva:
Ora, compagnie innovative che sondano questo terreno e forse lo estendono più lontano, stanno lasciando il segno nel web:
La lezione: Gli effetti Network dal contributo degli utenti sono la chiave per il dominio del mercato nell'era del Web 2.0.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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."t;
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 |
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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
Copyright © 2006 O'Reilly Media, Inc.