Web 2.0 Software Models Evolve as the Conference Season Begins in Earnest
From Dion Hinchcliffe, popular since 1 years
I'm here in New York City this morning at the start of the AjaxWorld Conference and Expo which I'm the technical chair for this year. We expect it will be a exciting event that will bring the very latest developments in Rich User Experiences. I'll be blogging as much as I can about what's happening here -- and indeed on what seems to be a nonstop series of conferences coming up -- on this blog, on the Web 2.0 Journal, as well as on ZDNet . In fact, AjaxWorld is just the first in a several month long series of events as one Web 2.0-related happening after the other [...]Go to site
While it's no longer quite so fashionable to label your Internet startup a "Web 2.0" company these days, the popularity of the term remains extraordinarily high and is presently used today both far and wide in traditional media and social media. The Google Trends graph in figure to the right tells the overall story; global search interest in Web 2.0 is more popular than "social media" and "social networking" combined and by a significant margin. About the only other strategic technology concept that has anywhere near the same volume of world-wide interest is service-oriented architecture (SOA), which as it turns out is also surprisingly closely related to Web 2.0. Granted, Google Trends is not a scientific, "bet-the-business" kind of source, but it's a pretty darn good barometer.Even for someone who spends much time with Web 2.0 concepts, I was surprised at this and I carried out a little cross checking from other sources and they all show the same disparity: Web 2.0 is far and away one of the most popular terms to describe the intrinsic nature of many new online applications and businesses. This apparently highlights large scale interest in a broad term that capture the innovations, new trends, and technologies that have emerged in the online space in the last few years. Web 2.0 has fit this bill better than any other single meme including the read/write Web, Social Computing, the Social Web, and the New Internet, to name just a few alternatives (and conceptually incomplete) terms that have been suggested. The only real problem with this is that term itself has sometimes devolved into a vague buzzword that is often substituted as a simple synonym for social software or rich user experience techniques such as Ajax. Part of this is that the early investigation into Web 2.0 trends attempted to use it as a placeholder until the real underlying patterns were actually identified. This work resulted in the famous Web 2.0 meme-map that began to put meat on the bones and ultimately resulted in the excellent Web 2.0 Principles and Best Practices by my good friend John Musser. However, the lack of early specifics, though a brilliant move that allowed the right concepts to emerge from research into what was happening online, rather prescribing it blindly, also left a lasting impression of a vague, somewhat shapeless term for "newness" in the online world to the extent that even Tim Berners-Lee himself was left doubting.However, it does appear that we are now left with both a very popular term that also has an increasingly large body of serious work that puts tremendous substance behind it. Academics such as Amy Shuen and her excellent Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide have produced enormous formal texts based on intensive research. A quick search of Google Scholar shows that over 14,000 references can be found. So too does the popular Web 2.0 Expo conference series continue and it has been expanding in recent years to the East Coast, Europe, and Asia. While the hype itself has largely dissipated and Gartner's 2008 Hype Cycle report says it's entering the trough of disillusionment, it also notes that "it will emerge within two years to have transformational impact, as companies steadily gain more experience and success with both the technologies and the cultural implications." I could not agree more.
Web 2.0: The Concepts Spread to Other Fields I've previously covered what Web 2.0 means exactly and the virtual ink spilled on this often surprisingly complex subject is itself vast. The Wikipedia definition of "Web 2.0" remains one of the most popular entries on the site and the number of offshoots of the term has been a saga in itself, from the early days of Advertising 2.0, Law 2.0, Library 2.0 to the newer, (generally) widely accepted terms Enterprise 2.0 and Government 2.0.For simplicity's sake, however, this is what we normally use to provide the most straightforward definitions of all things Web 2.0:Web 2.0 - The continuously changing, participatory Web with a focus on building collective intelligence on myriad devices and primarily servicing The Long Tail.Web 2.0 in the Enterprise - Web 2.0 as applied to business and not consumer solutions.Enterprise 2.0 - The social, collaborative network with emergent behavior and structure. At this point there are some that like to invoke Buzzword Bingo at such seemingly gratuitously coining of new terms, but I personally find this a crucially important point: The global network of the Web itself, which is shaped continually by the endless participation of hundreds of millions of users around the clock, is no more than a reflection of those that shape it (which are then shaped themselves by it.) That the principles of Web 2.0 cross all disciplines, types of business, types of government, all languages, and all types of peoples and cultures has fostered an interesting phenomenon. Each of these topical areas are in the various stages of translating how Web 2.0 transforms and improves what they do, from architectures of participation and harnessing collective intelligence to radical decentralization (with cloud computing being the most interesting new example) and open service ecosystems. 
This "localization" of Web 2.0 into specific verticals appears to be a natural competitive response by those trying to incorporate the latest best practices and proven technique into their work. In fact, I find that non-technologists and those whose professions are not spent in the world of software or in Internet businesses have a hard time incorporating, indeed translating, the Web 2.0 body of knowledge to their line of work. So one by one, we can thank a largely self-appointed group of experts have taken the trouble to map the 2.0 works into the many aspects of the world that are steadily being remade by the increasingly pervasive presence of the Web.It took us almost 10 years to figure out how to begin to use the Web properly and it may take another 10 years from now before most of us are incorporating the lessons of web 2.0 deeply into how we run their businesses. The result will be a transformed business and competitive landscape with products and services created and delivered in ways very unlike today (see my Web 2.0 predictions for 2008 for some details on this). It's also clear that the long-term implications will go well beyond that, similar to the way that the telephone, television, and especially the printing press changed how information was created, who could access it, and how it was owned and distributed. The parallels stop there since the deepest implications of 2.0 is a tremendous shift of control from the center of our networks to the edge. What other 2.0 memes are you tracking? Please put in comments below. 
Figure 1: Amazon's open Web APIs now consume more bandwidth than all their sites combined But what's also interesting is that it's taken nearly eight years for this result to occur for Amazon. Amazon was a first generation adopter of Web services and it was almost certainly the biggest pioneer as well. They offered Web services many years after their initial retail site launched and it's achieved much of its success because of the early years Amazon spent driving economies of scale and inefficiencies out of their operations and then flipped that expertise into cost-effective open Web services offered to their already vast customer base.Amazon's early retail success in this way brings up a common question I get in my discussions with people trying to create competitive online products today. The question is: "Was Amazon unique because of it's unusually dominant industry lead early in the history of the Web? Or is this this kind of growth a common effect for those that open up their platforms online to the Global SOA?"What is an open API? Read about the motivations and techniques for adding open Web APIs to a site. The good news for startups is that the answer seems to be no, Amazon is not unique in their success of their APIs. Certainly eBay has achieved a large measure of success with its open APIs, with over 60K registered developers and a large amount of API use. Salesforce too has been relatively successful with their open platform, and Google has as well with it's increasingly robust set of API offerings.But these are all larger, established Internet firms. How much can an API offering help a startup drive its network effect and platform adoption in the marketplace? The success of newer Web applications like Facebook, Twitter, and Friendfeed, which can be attributed to their success via the thousands of apps built for Facebook and dozens of applications for Twitter, which all capitalize on open APIs they offer (and indeed, are almost impossible without them) and drive the adoption of these apps. 
Figure 2: As new sites offer APIs closer to initial launch, stronger network effects can form earlier Twitter is believed to have 10 times the use through its API than through it's Web user interface and this is likely contributing to their highly publicized downtime lately as they attempt to struggle with fast growth. The Web services approach completely changes where the focus of product design is, from the human/machine interface to the machine/machine interface. This can be significant challenge for those who come from the traditional Web design world, where user interfaces where all that mattered. The Web industry is changing rapidly in the face of these trends and building open platforms that are used from across the Web is the name of the game now instead of simple, point Web sites. Sidebar: An approach called Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA) is an emerging best practice method for turning next-generation Web 2.0 applications into platforms.The fast growth of newer Web platforms is key to adoption these days and most new entries in the marketplace have at least an RSS feed but usually much more as it becomes necessary to get developer adoption and 3rd party applications to drive traffic growth and adoption. Big issues still abound around monetization strategies for Web APIs and the rapidly emerging mashup industry, but Amazon too has shown that it can be an entire line of business, even if the margins appear to be much smaller: despite enormous bandwidth growth, revenue per gigabit is beieved to be much smaller with Web services, certain to be of much interest as new Web apps get investment and go to market. I'll explore how this is likely to play out over the next few years as Web sevices industry and cloud computing and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) matures and evolves.What issues are you seeing with offering open APIs for your Web site or application?
It wasn't long ago that to be a credible participant in social media one only had to have a decent blog and keep it updated fairly regularly. The rise of social media was an astonishing and novel enough development that most people still don't blog today, despite the enormous influence that blogging and other forms of social media continue to have. One reason is that blogging takes time and takes some skill, both in writing and using blogging tools effectively. Another is the rise of online social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Hi5, which add a personal dimension to online interaction that many find more rewarding and relevant for them.But just like blogs made two-way conversations on the Web relatively cheap, easy, and quick for the masses compared to previous methods (such as personal Web sites), conversational models on the Web have continued to evolve. Recently, microblogging and social aggregation platforms like Twitter and Friendfeed have emerged to offer alternative models that are compelling for a number of significant reasons. For one, contributing to them doesn't take much time. To achieve this, they either have radical limits on the amount of content that can be posted at a time (140 characters for Twitter), or they do the posting work for you and automatically centralize your social activity on other sites into a single feed, as in the case of Friendfeed. They also tend to work very well on mobile devices -- an incredibly fast growing channel for experiencing anything on the Web these days -- as well scale conversation well, are extremely easy to use (even easier in general than blogs), and allow you to keep track of a large numbers of contacts socially.And vitally, both Twitter and Friendfeed are open platforms, not just mere tools. A key factor in their success is that they offer open APIs to allow others to add the features and capabilities that are missing for various specialty needs that would otherwise clutter the product for many users. This creates a far richer overall feature set than any single product could offer on its own, while at the same time leveraging the innovation of the user community. Blogs have been able to do something similar with badges, widgets, and plug-ins for some time but haven't seen the same directed results as we'll see below. The sheer volume of 3rd party add-on activity for these platforms is impressive. Best-of-breed applications like Twhirl for Twitter (and now Friendfeed) and AlertThingy for Friendfeed extend these new social media experiences onto the desktop and provide real-time monitoring of your "Twitterverse" or friend's feeds. To get a full sense of the depth and scope of the innovation of the Twitter community, which is certainly still a niche compared to the blogosphere, though an increasingly impressive one, you have only to look at some of its more compelling 3rd party applications:Common Twitter Applications Summize - A power search engine for scanning Twitter conversations for information Twitter Charts - Detailed analytics of your Twitter activities along many different metricsTwitterFeed - Link your blog activity to TwitterTwitterGram - Post MP3s into your Twitter conversations TweetBurner - Combined with twurl.org, this application shows click through analytics on your Twitter links as well as overall Twitterverse stats TweetWheel - Analysis your Twitter account's social graph to understand the connections between your followersTwittEarth - A 3d animated globe that shows activity in the Twitter public timeline in near real-timeTwitt(url)y - A link aggregator that reports on link activity within the Twitterverse, a sort of Techmeme for TwitterTwitSay - Use your phone to post to Twitter via a voice messageTwitterSnooze - Turn off a chatty user temporarily and bring them back automatically laterTwistori - An interesting dashboard that displays the expression of key memes from the Twitter public timeline, creating a sort of global collective intelligenceTwubble - Many new Twitter users have trouble finding users to follower, this tool helps finds new contacts you might care about This only a small list of the most popular Twitter applications and they don't even include the product offerings that are stand-alone in their own right, but work much better in conjunction with Twitter and Friendfeed, such as Brightkite and Natuba.Understanding How Conversations Are ChangingThe challenge today is that while the size of individual contributions to online conversations is getting smaller, the frequency of conversations are increasing on these new social media platforms. Making this point, Sarah Perez over at Read/Write Web wrote this morning that there are too many choices, and too much content. Users of the latest social media tools are far more likely to post several times a day, more likely dozens of times, each one forming a new conversational beachhead. This can be overwhelming, but it can also be enormously stimulating and rewarding, as a form of collaboration, cross-pollination, brainstorming, serendipity, news gathering, and countless other activities provide one with a continuous connection to the broader world.To get a handle on how people are using these next generation social media platforms, I ran an online survey this week which I pushed out across my Twitter followers, Friendfeed contacts, and a random sampling of my personal contact via e-mail (the latter without regard if they used these tools.) The results largely reflect many of the points above, but there were some interesting write-in results as well.Here's how the Twitter survey results broke down:Results Of This Week's Twitter/Friend Usage Survey Do use Twitter or Friendfeed on a regular basis? (Multiple Answers Allowed): 96.1% Twitter, 25.2% Friendfeed, 3.9% NeitherWhat things do you like about Twitter, Friendfeed, or your write-in choice from question #1: (Multiple answers allowed):My friends and/or colleagues use it. 65%A good selection of 3rd party apps are available. 26.2%I've built up a set of followers which I've come to know and with which I socialize. 42.7%It's easy to use. 71.8%It works well with my mobile devices when I'm on the go. 43.7%Contributing doesn't require much time. 69.9%Easy to socially interact with a large number of people. 59.2%I can publicize my activities from other Web sites. 37.9%Useful way to acquire news and information. 71.8%It's better than e-mail for quick communication with contacts. 35.9%Actually, I don't think Twitter or Friendfeed are that great. 4.9%What do you like LEAST about Twitter, Friendfeed, or your write-in answer for #1: (Write-In. Representative Samples.) "Twitter lacks a feature to filter or an easy way to group.""Twitter is yet another thing to keep up with, I much prefer the all-inclusive nature of Facebook.""downtime""I get a lot of noise, that is, useless information from people I'm following.""Poor support for conversations. no threads, don't see other half if not following all involved.""I've found it's hard to get some of my friends to adopt it."Do now, or are you planning to, use Twitter or Friendfeed for business purposes?Yes. 66%No. 12%Considering it. 22%One of the biggest surprises of this survey (there were 103 respondents total) was the amount of those who are thinking about using Twitter for business purposes. Whether that's just expanding their personal brand or actually leveraging it for business collaboration, marketing, and other uses is hard to tell and will be the subject of a further survey.Interestingly, in terms of being used as Enterprise 2.0 platforms by businesses, both Twitter and Friendfeed fly in the face of the underlying pull-based models that make social media more effective that traditional collaboration tools and it'll be interesting to see how well they will function in the workplace, something that seems a way off for most organizations right now. And it may be that in the end that social networking for business platforms like Google's new Friend Connect may be the best answer. One thing is for sure, we'll find out soon as the living laboratory of the Web validates the best approaches. Most other responses were within expected norms though it was interesting to see that, at least explicitly, users don't value 3rd party apps that much. And it was ease-of-use and the gathering of news and information which were listed as the aspects that respondents appreciated the most in these platforms. Which highlights that crowdsourcing of news via Twitter in particular continues to be a fascinating topic as a Paul Bradshaw wrote recently as he explored the news coming out of China about the recent earthquake disaster. All of this highlight that the unintended uses and emergent outcomes that we continue to see with with these platforms is demonstrating that they have the power to achieve compelling results of a wide variety, from news and learning to staying in touch and achieving business goals. But the biggest challenge will continue to be the challenge of scaling our attention and time, something that's always in finite quantity. The product creator that can successfully aggregate conversation without losing the social value will be the winner as these endless conversations spin around us, informing, educating and enriching us.You can track me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe and on Friendfeed at http://friendfeed.com/dhinchcliffe.Where do you see conversation online headed? Will it be microplatforms like Twitter or SNS like Google Friend Connect? Or something else entirely? Note: Use wiki markup below to embed links. 
I've been spending a good amount of time the last several weeks getting ready for the workshop session I'll be giving at Web 2.0 Expo next week in San Francisco on building next-generation Web 2.0 applications. What does "next generation" mean compared to what we were doing a couple of years ago with Web 2.0? A good number of things it turns out. 
We're currently seeing that newer Web applications are much more federated than in the past, meaning they're made of distributed parts instead of being just one app on a Web server at one domain and are increasing leveraging external Web services and APIs. We're also seeing Web app functionality being bundled up into user distributable components such as widgets, gadgets, badges, and SNS embedded apps. Next generation Web apps are also much more social than in the past with features such as friends lists, activity streams, and aggregation from other social sites as well as using that information to really learn about your customer like Facebook does And new Web apps are leveraging powerful new development platforms like Ruby on Rails, grid environments like 3tera , or cloud computing platforms like Amazon's EC2 and Google App Engine (my comparison of the latter two is here on ZDNet.) And these are just three of the larger aspects of the many new things taking place in on the 'edge' of the Web today. That's a lot of things to learn for those who want to build Web applications that offer competitive features and will cost effectively scale as apps get larger, while often using technology that's still fairly experimental. And that's one of the big reasons we suggested this workshop to help get a snapshot of the current state of the industry to get up to speed on the latest. So we're going to spend Tuesday afternoon at Expo going over the details of everything that's happening in the Web app development space to the fullest extent possible. And while I reserve the right to change things right up the very last moment, here's what I plan on covering next week in San Francisco:We'll start by providing a detailed examination of the best methods for turning a Web application into an open platform to drive growth through the use of open Web APIs with REST, JSON, ATOM. The key success factors for the underpinning business models of open Web platforms including brief case studies will be presented. Designing for consumption in mashups and 3rd party Web apps will also be covered. I'm planning to build a Ruby on Rails REST API during the session based on the positive experiences we had a few weeks ago with Rails 2.0. The very latest rich user experience platforms will be explored including Ajax, Adobe’s AIR, Microsoft’s Silverlight, and Sun’s JavaFx with an eye towards how to take advantage of their individual strengths to create new, highly compelling user experiences not previously possible, including for the next generation of mobile devices. This session will then look in detail at the latest in Web identity models with a focus on how to use openid and other popular Web single-sign on models to offer users the identity choices they’ll prefer in the near future. The cutting edge of social distribution channels will be explored through the latest field research in OpenSocial and Facebook application models and how best to package and distribute your Web application within popular and high volume social ecosystems and Web widgets. The second half of the workshop explores the architectures and cutting edge development models of Web 2.0 era applications circa 2008. The latest techniques for designing applications out of other pre-existing online platforms such as AWS, Google’s APIs, and many others will be given with specific examples for dramatically cutting the cost and time to market of modern Web applications. The latest in emergent architecture techniques, large-scale customer testing approaches, and rapid scalability methods (summary of these three here) will round out the workshop and finish with a informative survey of the latest productivity-oriented development platforms for creating highly effective Web applications including Ruby on Rails 2.0, Cake PHP, Groovy, Grails, and others.And while I'll into more details about these in my session, here are some high level tips for building next generation Web 2.0 applications:Tips for Building Next Generation Web 2.0 Applications First, understand the basics of Web 2.0. Here is a popular overview I wrote a little while back that has the essential design patterns of Web 2.0 as well as how they specifically plug into a viable business model.Assemble a development team that is willing to learn. The market is moving at light speed at the moment and new models for designing, building, hosting, and distributing Web apps are emerging rapidly. Because of this, it's fairly unlikely you'll be able to hire the folks that already have the skills you need, so the next best thing is hiring people who are passionate about and able to learn the latest new things quickly.Spend some time studying the competition. It's definitely not polite to directly design replicate another company's Web app, but they'll do all sorts of things with their application that will give you new ideas and places to take your project that you never thought about. That doesn't mean you have to do exactly what they do, far from it. But when you're playing on the Web, you 'replaying the same ecosystem and it's often surprising how you can affect each other.Really get to know your customers. You might think they're consumers but they might really be small businesses or big enterprises. All of the audience groups out there have specific needs and once you learn your demographic and who is actually using your applications, you can start offering them what they really need. For example, here's what large enterprise are typically doing with Web 2.0. It's a lot different from what consumers will generally do. Deeply understanding your customers (which you can watch live as they interact with your product) will make your product as successful as possible. In fact, I called this the First Commandment of application development. Along the way, don't lose sight of the fundamentals of Web 2.0. It's what makes your product especially potent and drives the core of the long-term value it generates. But it's easy to forget in the haze of Web design, feature-itis, testing, deployment, hosting, and scaling. I'm not talking the surface gloss that most people are referring to with Web 2.0, I'm talking the serious stuff like Architectures of Participation, building a strong network effect, and capturing classes of data online. Also read my Sixteen Ways essay as well as Product Development 2.0, they can help guide you enormously. Finally, use all the latest tools, technologies, apps, platforms and gain ground truth on what they can do. There is no substitute for using things hands on and understanding what they are capable of. Yes, this is time-consuming. No, you can't skip it. This is the special sauce that many entreprenuers fail at doing: Using Web 2.0-style apps in their personal and work life and getting their hands deep into the actual technologies. Get to understand these things profoundly including how they work and their strengths and weaknesses.I'll be at Web 2.0 Expo for most of the week and I'll be keeping everyone up to date on my Twitter feed , so please follow me if you want to keep up with the very latest.What are you most interested in from a Web 2.0 application design perspective? Put your comments below and use wiki markup for links.
I've been evaluating a number of these the last few weeks and so far Friendfeed seems to be one of the best offerings in this space and also supports one of the widest array of online services, with Socialthing a close second. Friendfeed currently monitors and aggregates one's social activity on 28 different services at the time of this writing, putting the result into one clean activity stream with a matching Atom feed. While the latency on some of the services Friendfeed tracks isn't always great -- del.icio.us bookmarks seem to take a good long while to show up for example -- the integration ranges from the workable to the robust, with surprisingly good support for Twitter's hashtags for example. Services you also might not have previously considered aggregating socially are also offered by Friendfeed including your Gmail status message, Netflix rental queue, and your LinkedIn activity.However, a quick examination of Alexa traffic charts (partial sample below) shows there are no clear leaders in this emerging space that will soon be crowded with competition, if it isn't already. Peter Cashmore at Mashable tracked at least 20 entries in this space mid-last year and so it's interesting to see how quickly Friendfeed has risen among the various players. Ease of use, visual elegance, and breadth of service tracking appears to be the competitive discriminator here, like it is with so many things in the Web 2.0 world. 
This morning Duncan Riley at TechCrunch covered the best ways to track Web 2.0 and he omitted social aggregators as something users should be taking advantage of, while explicitly including things like TechMeme and blog readers. That's because social aggregation are far from mainstream yet and the long term staying power of these individual Web applications aren't clear, making it a challenge to decide where to "move in". But increasingly -- as Robert Scoble did this week -- I'm finding that I'm checking my Friendfeed stream and not Facebook or Techmeme as much as I used to, and I suspect many others will as well as they find aggregated social activity streams the fullest and most convenient picture of their social network. The egalitarian nature of social aggregators is also appealing at a time when many social networks are trying to put up as much of a walled garden as users will accept.The wild cards for this space include major players such as Google or Facebook credibly adding social aggregation to their own offerings. Open social networking standards such as Open Friend Format will also make this space interesting in the medium to long term. Please tell us your favorite social aggregator below.
Simply put, a social graph is a set of people, referred to as nodes, that are connected together by vertices -- better known as links or connections -- that reflect their social relationships. You can see a conceptual social graph above, showing the typical distinction of social networks to reflect whether a connection with another person is direct or indirect. For example, the popular business social networking service LinkedIn, uses this model and sorts a member's social graph into different degrees of separation, which you can see a typical example of below and taken from my LinkedIn profile: 
Also becoming popular is the burgeoning field of social analytics, such as the Socalistics application in Facebook and the Interactive Friends Graph, though there are also commercial standalone products here or on the way for the enterprise and open Web spaces from companies like KnowNow and Bravadosoft. The Interactive Friends Graph is a nice, simple example anyone can try on their own and you can see mine from Facebook below. Hovering over nodes in the live version in your Facebook profile allows you to see who is connected to others in your network and begin to gain insight and understanding of the relationships in your network. 
But what are the top issues one must understand about the social graph in 2008? As I've seen social networks become common on corporate intranets and in daily use on the Web, some of the issues are rapidly becoming clear. However, the full story will certainly continue to unfold for the next several years at least. Here's what we're seeing at the moment: Strategies and Issues for the Social Graph - Circa 2008The social graph is poised to replace the address book and contact list as the preferred organizing structure for personal and business relationships. This was one of my Web 2.0 predictions for 2008 and it won't fully come true for the majority of users for at least several years since there's such an installed base of traditional tools for managing relationship information. What's the difference? Social networks are usually opt-in, two-ways for one. And they are social for another, meaning they tend to encourage communication and collaboration, such as through user profile event streams and status messages. They also offer up and actively make use of the deeper insight into the full graph's social surface area beyond direct contacts, such as LinkedIn's introduction service.Ownership of the social graph is going to be a ground zero issue in 2008. Robert Scoble's widely covered attempt recently to use Plaxo Pulse to export his 5,000 Facebook contacts recently got him banned temporarily from the service. But as users begin to realize that the contact lists they are building using online Web tools might not be portable, this will become a growing concern, particularly since two-way opt-in makes a social graph more valuable (and accurate) but significantly harder to recreate on demand elsewhere. This takes us to our next subject...Many social networking services will adopt open data initiatives. Both Google and Facebook recently showed support for DataPortability.org. This is welcome news that will resolve some of the concerns around who owns the graph but interestingly, traditional corporations will be the slowest get this and will rarely let workers take their hard won social graphs and user profiles with them elsewhere as they move to new jobs. Public social networking sites Web sites are leading the way here and this will only drive more business users to the open Web, where they at least have some control over their social graph. Smart organizations will provide their workers with some form of open social graph support, lest they lose control completely as workers keep more and more of their graph in Facebook, LinkedIn, and Plaxo and not in prescribed relationship management tools. Attempts to monetize social graphs will drive interest in regulation and legislation. Social networking is now a global Internet phenomenon and that the information contained within them is highly central to everyone's lives. This will make everything from protecting children to individual privacy of social graphs a hot issue for some local and federal governments. All it will take is one or two widely covered exploits to make this happen. Expect the European Union and the U.S. government to begin seriously examining the issue this year with many other governments following suite. Good citizenship of sites that manage social graphs will be essential to prevent excessive government involvement. The line is blurring between personal and business use of social graphs. We're all rapidly getting one large social graph each already, with everyone we know in them. Most public social networking sites do a poor job of separating different subgroups of our social networks, such as allowing pictures and status messages to only go to a specific subgroups (work messages to business, family message to family, friends messages to friend, etc.) This actually works a little bit better in enterprise social networks, but not much, since it largely consists of a Contact Type field. Segmentation of social graphs will be an increasingly requested feature by users struggling with their use. The social graph management services that make this distinction and enable its leverage may do very well indeed.Open Web identity, which will ultimately form the global "primary key" for social graph nodes, will not get anywhere soon. This despite it being needed badly but the users of the Web have not yet felt compelled to demand it. Data portability of social graphs will begin to drive adoption of user controlled Web identity, and hopefully government regulation will not. See Dare Obasanjo's deep exploration of using openid to enable social graph interoperability as an example of what will need to happen, despite there being little incentive currently for sites to use other site's openids.Making social networking "gardening" and administration easier will drive new innovations. Most individual social graphs are primarily tended by hand today, although a growing number of products, such as Visible Path, do all the tedious work for you by watching your social interaction online such as through tight integration through e-mail and instant messaging, building a rich graph for you (even sending invitations) as you go about your daily social activities. New innovations like these will make social graphs easier to maintain and richer in overall information while also driving adoption through ease of use.The optional two-way confirmation of a social graph link becoming standard. Many social graph management platforms (Facebook and Linked for example) require confirmation from the other side of the connection before adding a person to your graph. Sites like Spock, which make it optional, will ultimately be more practical for managing a social graph while still allowing discernment of two way confirmations, which tend to be more valuable and convey key information about the trust and real extent of a social relationship. Social networking fatigue will not set in as perceived constraints such as Dunbar's limit do not prove to be universal. While there are many theories on how big a social graph can get before it become unmanageable and sees diminishing returns on growth (note that both Facebook and LinkedIn encourage ceilings), the fact is that the are many different purposes for a social graph, from data mining and historical research, to marketing and customer relationship management. What else is going to be key to dealing with the social graph in 2008? Please leave in comments below and I'll update this post with any good submissions.
Rich Internet Application (RIA) platforms such as Adobe AIR and Microsoft's Silverlight get major traction as the development of non-trivial Web applications in Ajax remains difficult and time-consuming. While Ajax is made from 100% open Web standards, it was never explicitly designed for the job of creating rich user experiences and it's proven tough going for many companies trying to create next generation Web experiences in Ajax. Adobe and Microsoft have been making enormous investments in browser plug-ins and supporting development tools that will change the way the Web will look in 2008 and beyond. These two platforms will be huge successes this year, despite the many challenges that RIA platforms face such as supporting page view-based business models, analytics, accessibility, network effects, link structure, search engine optimzation (SEO) and more.Google's product strategy begins to coalesce into a mostly coherent picture, though a few big pieces won't fit into the puzzle. While appearing to overextend itself into everything from online office application, mobile phone platforms, energy, and health, some of it will begin to make sense as the missing pieces begin to emerge next year. Look for a strategy that combines a long-term vision to combine enormous reach (mobile as well as social data) as well as function (software apps, utility capabilities such as search and location) and business (advertising) into an interlocking platform play of a scope and breadth that will, pound for pound, out maneuver the vast majority of their competition. Disclaimer: I am a Google shareholder. The Web 2.0 industry consolidates as it begins to mature. This has been covered extensively on Mashable and John Battelle's 2008 prediction list so I don't need to repeat their outlooks, which I generally agree with. Most startups, as in any generation, will fall by the wayside and a few major success stories will emerge. Mergers and acquisitions will ensue. The next generation will begin, and so on. The reality is that most new Web apps are still mostly Web 1.0. We still have a long way to go before Web 2.0 design patterns are standard fare but Web 3.0 (whatever that turns out to be) will come upon us while that's still happening. 2008 will see a lot of old Web 2.0 faces be acquired or leave the scene entirely. End-user mashups will be a reality but adoption will be slow for most of the year as users take time coming to grips with the possibilities and mindset. A little while back I wrote a detailed list of reasons why end-user mashups wouldn't happen in a big way in 2007. Since then, it looks like only a couple of those reasons will be addressed in 2008. Despite this, we'll see mashup platforms being rolled out by IT departments and high-functioning businesses as a significantly better and cheaper way to solve many problems by remixing the immense pool of content and functionality on the Web and in our organizations. The average user will need time for this potential to be appreciated and understood but we'll see the first significant creation of end-user assembled Web applications in 2008. The Web widget format wars will ensue as Google Gadgets/OpenSocial takes on just about everyone else. No one will win yet. 2007 was the year of the Do-It-Yourself era when it comes to users creating their own experiences out of the Web, often by just pulling off the parts of a Web site they liked and sharing it with others in their blogs and user profiles. To embrace this demand, almost all major Web sites currently offer their sites in modular chunks known as widgets, or if you're Google or Microsoft, gadgets that their users can distribute. However, like many aspects of Web 2.0, Web widgets are an emergent phenomenon with no large company or standards organization having created it up front with lots of engineering and funding. As a result, there are many different ways to design and offer a Web widget with Google taking the clear lead at the moment with well over 30,000 different Gadgets currently being offered. Throw in SNS widget/app platforms such as Facebook applications and OpenSocial and you have a recipe for fragmentation and an increasing to do list for Web sites which want to participate in what is a growing and often captive ecosystem of users controlled by each format's backer. No consensus will be reached by the Web industry in 2008 but many solutions will be proposed, such as the W3C's Widget spec. Page view "inventories" for online advertising continue to fall short of demand, even if an economic downturn takes place. The well regarded McKinsey & Company predicted last year that advertising will actually have fairly significant growth challenges for the next five years from high demand and lack of maturity in the management of online advertising through traditional outlets. My personal take: I've seen enough pent-up demand that I don't think even an economic downtown will noticeable affect the fortunes of online adveritising for the foreseeable future. Web-based Software as a service (SaaS), aka Office 2.0, continues to encounter serious challenges but grows at a record pace anyway. Offline access to applications and data remains one of the biggest challenges to true Web-based software, but Google Gears and offerings from firms like Etelos are offering more and more options to make Web apps work offline (albeit with reductions in functionality). Other challenges include the cumulative drag of paying a periodic subscription fee for access to software as well security and overall capability. Despite this, positive aspects of SaaS will continue to prevail and 2008 is looking to be the biggest SaaS year yet. A wave of new killer mobile Web applications (and their startups) appear, spurred by the iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) and ever more untethered workers. Twitter was likely just the first in an era of fundamentally network-oriented applications with communications and collaboration at their core. The release of the iPhone last year proved that Web apps could be nearly as functional and pleasing as desktop apps. The coming iPhone SDK, which will let anyone build iPhone software legally, will help usher in a new era of useful new consumer and business mobile applications, many which will sport Web 2.0 capabilities or even be fundamentally Web 2.0 based, such as route capturing software and automatic traffic tracking, particularly as more mobile devices add GPS capability in 2008. The first Android-powered phones will fail to impress and a decent, though not spectacular, iPhone upgrade keeps Apple ahead of the industry. Google's widely covered Android platform will experience the usual beta/1.0 issues, particularly since one company doesn't have control over the entire product development process of Android phones. Expect the usual issues the crop up while Apple maintains its market lead with the most Web-friendly communications device yet created by releasing a solid upgrade of the iPhone this year. Mobile Web 2.0 apps will get very popular in 2008. Social media begins to grow up, leading to the first significant onset of Web 2.0 versions of talent agents, production companies, and other supply/demand enablers. Blogs and other forms of social media like backyard produced YouTube videos let anyone reach out to the entire audience of the Web at the cost of nothing more than a little bit of their time. Despite the hugely democratizing effect this is having in the media world, the new online stars of the Web 2.0 still need professional help to maximize their opportunities and potential. While this has been going on for a while with media companies cultivating paid bloggers and other forms of leveraging social media, expect that the social media phenomenon will being to create its own cottage industry of agents that can help the talented reach the Web mot effectively, for a cut of the action of course. On the other side, production companies will form to give rising stars the resources they need to succeed. We'll see a spate of new companies forming around this growing need in 2008, as traditional companies in this space continue to struggle with the medium. Leading social networking sites MySpace and Facebook continue to maintain their traffic but struggle to ignite significant revenue growth. Facebook's widely covered struggles late last year with the business model of its Beacon product is somewhat indicative of the entire Web 2.0 era: Incredible levels of participation with serious challenges to leveraging said participation due to privacy, governance, ownership, copyright, and other issues. Make no mistake, however, these issues will be solved given the massive global stake in a successful outcome but it'll take at least through 2008 to do it. The Web moves into the living room as sites like Hulu and others make it practical and rewarding to participate on the Web using a large screen for entertainment. Digital convergence in the main room of our homes has been in progress for a half-decade or more. I'm a little reluctant to call it but I have definitely noticed a sharp uptick in the people I know starting to use the Web on the big screen. New Web apps are emerging to make it popular and mainstream, and in 2008, will see the first big major uptake in the Web, and in rich media apps in particular, in the living room. The first generation of pure Web 2.0 auteurs emerge, creating social media and user-centric online experiences that are highly imaginative and popular, but difficult to access for the non-digitally literate. The first generation of users whose most formative years were primarily spent in the Web 2.0 era are beginning to reach the age where they will become significant creative forces in their own right. As the Web has become easy enough for semi-technical people to create nearly any experience they wish, expect that a generation of youth who consider the Web as natural a medium as the air they breath will begin to generate not just content but the next aspects of the Web itself. While we continue to hold up movie directors, authors, TV production firms, and commercial Internet companies as the creators of most of the common large-scale group experiences we have, expect that Web 2.0 will impose its egalitarian influences here as well. I predict we'll see an initial handful of Web 2.0 auteurs emerge that will offer large-scale Web-based "experiences" that will not only redefine the notion of the Web site itself but will be widely used as well. I also expect that many of them will come from developing nations or from other unexpected locations and less from the United States and Europe.Update: TechCrunch covers JP Morgan's bullish predictions for the Web business in 2008.Where do you think the Web will go in 2008? Please leave your take in comments below.
In case you've been hiding under a rock lately, you know that Facebook is presently the industry darling in social networking, having largely pushed MySpace off the industry's stage, as it seems to offer a more compelling model for social interaction to users overall. Just as importantly, Facebook also lets any other company that wants to join in party do so by building 3rd party Facebook applications, of which over 7,100 now exist, making Facebook increasingly rich in functionality and content by leveraging the creative capacity at the edge of the Web. In the Web 2.0 era (and in all computing eras before), the truism that a platform beats an application every time applies here with a vengeance and MySpace and other social networking sites have suddenly rushed to embrace openness and 3rd party widgets and gadgets to the extent that MySpace has thrown in with Google on OpenSocial.So the damage is done and in the fickle world of online social networking, Facebook currently has the upper hand. This demonstrates yet again a powerful but counterintuitive aspect of networked software: the more control you give away, the more value you can get back.Read my ZDNet coverage on how Facebook got ready to overtake MySpace and the challenges of setting up shop inside it. However, much of the blogging around OpenSocial would have you believe that has Google now trounced the competition with a strategic move that counters Facebook's open SNS platform move with an open SNS application model that can work everywhere else too. At least, that is, the other social networking sites that support OpenSocial's API. But as Don Dodge noted in his OpenSocial coverage this isn't going to stop developers from building apps natively for Facebook any time soon and will have little practical effect on existing Facebook users for quite a while. Not to mention the rest of the Web, since not even a single real OpenSocial application yet exists.That's not to say however that OpenSocial doesn't have its advantages. Joe Kraus, a Director of Product Management at Google, wrote today on the Official Google blog that OpenSocial will make life easier for developers "because it makes it easier for them to focus on making their web apps better; they get lots of distribution with a lot less work. It's good for websites, because they can tap into the creativity of the largest possible developer community (and no longer have to compete with one another for developer attention). And finally, it's good for users, because they get more applications in more places."So, despite the early beginnings, does OpenSocial makes a lot of sense from the production side of social networking applications? It still remains to be seen, despite the enormous amount of early partner support for it, if the consumption side in terms of these kinds of applications really generates value. Most of the applications on Facebook provide so little actual utility that they are barely worth installing. While making these mini-apps portable between social networking sites is convenient -- and it probably will appreciably increase the total number of available social applications -- it's really people and the network effect they represent for a given social networking site that makes the site truly valuable. In other words, if my friends and colleagues aren't on the social networking site I use, then that site is of little or no use to me, even if I can take my apps with me.It'll be interesting to see what ultimately happens to OpenSocial. I suspect it will actually see fairly good uptake since it's based on the highly successful Google Gadgets model, for which of 23,000 different Gadgets presently exist. But will it change the playing field in the social networking wars? Probably not as much as a federated social identity would. Federated social identity could potentially let you exist and participate simultaneously in all the social networks you wanted to at once using one set of social metadata you control. That's probably a lot closer to the Facebook killer that so many are looking for and things like openid are bring that world closer to reality all the time. In the meantime, here's the six things you absolutely have to know about OpenSocial to have an opinion about it:6 Essential Things You Need To Know About Google's OpenSocialOpenSocial only offers the lowest common denominator, not the full richness of each social networking platform. While application developers can create apps using the OpenSocial model and they will be able to run on dozens of different social networking sites, OpenSocial can't help you leverage the full capabilities of the site it runs on. Most social networking site APIs aren't as completed as say, the Windows APIs, but we've seen this before with platforms such as Java. Write once, test everywhere is the name of the game here and while economies in this model exist, it tends to lock out and prevent product differentiation. To get at the full richness of the underlying platform, you have do custom coding for that site and you've just broken the reason to use it. OpenSocial is largely based on open standards and there's only minor developer lock-in. It actually seems pretty safe to do a lot of your social application development using OpenSocial. It uses XML, HTML, Javascript, and the data formats are all ATOM and RESTful. You can even host Flash content and functionality inside the OpenSocial application as long as you don't break the rules. Finally, most of the really popular development platforms, including Ruby on Rails, can support the server-side API. All in all, Google seems to have stuck to a fairly open and non-proprietary model. OpenSocial documentation and sample code all uses the Creative Commons licensing and Apache 2.0, and the OpenSocial FAQ says everything will be open sourced at some point. Kudos for this open stance, Google. OpenSocial is a real doorway to social networking data portability as well as potential security holes. A site that supports OpenSocial applications provides that application with all the people data in that user's account. Their own info as well as their friends. This can be used to export user's social data from sites that don't support themselves directly and it could even be used to knit together a person's social data across other social sites that support OpenSocial, with properly designed 3rd party apps. But it also opens the door to security problems and expect to see that security, cross-site scripting, and exploits become an issue over time, as it always does when platforms open up to the rest of the world.OpenSocial is simple and straightforward but also capable of developing full-blown, rich Internet applications. And without server-side infrastructure. Developers can simply innovate with a few bits of markup and procedural code and drop it into the OpenSocial ecosystem and leverage the massive audiences and scalable infrastructure of OpenSocial compliant sites. OpenSocial even supports powerful interactive Web user interface models like Ajax explicitly. Like we saw last year, with the new productivity-oriented Web development platforms, this will change what's possible while also creating mountains and mountains of useless, uninteresting apps in between a few real gems. But a lot more wildflowers will bloom on the OpenSocial landscape and some will likely rise up and show us how useful these applications can be. OpenSocial is from Google and excessive philanthropy should not be expected. Google almost certainly thinks OpenSocial will ultimately be very good for Google, if not outright bad for a few others (probably Facebook). While the openness is encouraging, if OpenSocial is successful, Google almost certainly has a plan to make that success work for it and those plans may not always be to the benefit of everyone playing under the OpenSocial umbrella. User beware.A new era in competency in social software is being ushered in by models like OpenSocial. A lot more social applications are being created because of open social platforms have become so popular. But building successful social applications is a lot different prospect from building traditional business and consumer applications. Expect that many developers and software designers will fail to build applications successfully until we learn that a different focus and way of thinking is required. I've written before about the basic rules for building good social applications, but these are just the beginning. Understanding people is the key to building effective social networking applications, and that is often the hardest thing for us in an industry obsessed with connecting with each other via 1s and 0s.What else do we need to know about Google's OpenSocial? Put your ideas in comments below or drop me a line at dion@hinchcliffeandco.com.Going to Web 2.0 Expo Berlin? I'll be there November, 5th and 6th giving two sessions (What is Web 2.0 and The Rise of Widgets) as well as on the show floor at the Reply booth, our European partners for Web 2.0 University.
In my diagram above, I depict the growth of the Internet and various new stages of it, including Web 2.0, which I often say that Tim Berners-Lee gave us, but we didn't get at first. I put it together to show how each new development grew exponentially, unlike many of the other aspects added to it (things like Gopher for example). Network effects for these extensions of the Internet (the Web and Web 2.0) have indeed been exponential in terms of growth and adoption, but Enterprise 2.0 does not fit nicely onto this Internet extension model. This is because in practice Enterprise 2.0 presence will be highly fragmented since its implementations will exist just as much on private IP networks inside firewalls as well as on the open Internet, and often bridge them as well.So how do we measure the growth of Enterprise 2.0? That will be one of the toughest questions as we try to figure out what's really happening with Web 2.0 platforms in the enterprise. There's little question however that it's become a major trend on its own, whether we give it a name or not. For example, Wiki platforms have already begun proliferating inside most organizations, and so too with blogs, and other Enterprise 2.0 platforms.How do you think we should measure Enterprise 2.0's growth?Editorial Note: This is my inaugural blog post as the new Editor-In-Chief of Social Computing Magazine. I've retired as EiC of the Web 2.0 Journal and AjaxWorld Magazine and have accepted Jeremy Geelan's gracious invitation to help head up this highly informative online exploration on the application of Web 2.0 and social software to business, society, and culture. Stay tuned here at the Web 2.0 Blog for lots more and please do drop me a line and let me know what you're doing in the Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 communities.
I'm finally back home in Washington, DC and fully recovered from the three whirlwind days that made up O'Reilly's epic FOO Camp 06 over the past weekend. The event was nothing if not spectacular and included real camping, a genuine Google Earth fly-over, lots of opinionated discussion between extremely smart people, flamethrowing robots, and some excellent unconference material of all kinds including -- of course -- about Web 2.0.The first evening consisted primarily of getting settled in, having dinner, and general introductions in the big tent on the O'Reilly campus in Sebastopol, California. I met plenty of folks I hadn't met before including Dale Doughtery, the man who coined the term "Web 2.0", and who also edits the popular MAKE magazine. Though fun, it wasn't until the next morning that things really got started.
FOO Camp 06 - 1st DayThe day's sessions began at 10:00AM and I headed off to Timeless Code, a great session put together by D. Richard Hipp, creator of SQLite, and Greg Stein, chairman of the Apache Foundation. Attended by David Heinemeier Hansson, Martin Fowler, and many others, the session explored how to make code last the test of time. We explored the fact that some organizations are actively running code that's decades old and that some organizations, particularly the government, plan for code to last for 30 years and more.Some folks brought up the intriguing Long Now project to build the Millenium Clock as an example of the types of challenges that it will take in order to make code resist aging including the disintegration of society and the transformation of language itself. Tom Malloy of Adobe observed that Adobe is trying to figure out how to design PDFs to be readable a thousand years into the future. The upshot is that as more Web content on the Web continues to accumulate, making it available to future generations will become a serious challenge. Projects like The Wayback Machine, which makes already it possible to see virtually any Web site through the lens of time, will be essential stewards of our digital past to ensure we don't ultimately lose most of the rich Internet ecosystem we're quickly building with user generated content and Web 2.0 concepts.The next session was a thought provoking romp across the intellectual terrain of innovation and creative thinking given by Scott Berkun (be sure to read his great roll-up of FOO Camp here). Attended by Caterina Fake, Tara Hunt, and a cast of others, Scott sparked conversation and debate across the spectrum. I found this session so fascinating I made a full digital movie of it I'll make it available in the near future via my del.icio.us links. Scott touched on common misperceptions on innovation and cited plenty of historical examples including Isaac Newton discovering gravity and how Thomas Edison developed the light bulb. Afterwards I cited to Scott some fascinating thinking that John Hagel and John Seely Brown are doing on open innovation and something they call Creation Nets. He promised to look into it for his forthcoming book on innovation which was ostensibly the subject for the session.At lunch, Google had a plane fly over and re-image the O'Reilly campus for Google Earth. A sizeable crowd of folks all fell back onto the grass each time the plane went by, including for a few passes, Tim O'Reilly himself (in light blue shirt on the flyby picture to the left.)After lunch I attended a session given by Niall Kennedy and Sam Ruby on Syndication Hacks. It was after a terrific lunch and though I thought it might be a bit of a rough start, I couldn't have been more mistaken. A great general discussion about RSS and Atom syndication ensued and it was an excellent overview, particular for me, about the specific capabilities of Atom, which has a great REST-based model for the two-way use of a feed, allowing it to be used as a true general purpose Web service for lists of items. Very excellent indeed.At 2:00PM, Kathy Sierra gave her usually amazing talk on Addictive User Experiences in the biggest room at FOO Camp (I think, anyway), in an auditorium up on the 3rd floor of one of O'Reilly buildings. Right before it began I ran into Om Malik and had a chat with him and I conveyed to him how big a fan I was. In any case, I was struck by how many of the techniques that Kathy talks about are of specific advantage when co-evolving Web 2.0 sites with users. Best quote: "Make the right thing easy, and the wrong thing hard to do."After this I went to Gregor Hohpe's informative session on Out of Control: Working with Ultra Large Websites. Gregor, who I haven't seen since the SPARK event earlier this year, has done some well-known work with the design patterns of large, highly integrated systems and I was eager to learn more. The discussion ranged around highly multicore systems, custom ruggedized file systems, management methods, monitoring tools, as well as radical decentralization -- Web 2.0-style -- using techniques like the BitTorrent protocol to scale out instead of up and use other people's infrastructure to do it. One thing is for sure, the incredible scale of our Web systems is pushing the edge of our abilities in many ways from reliability and scalability to cost effectiveness and design for manageability.
FOO Camp 06 - 2nd DayThe next morning it was my turn to give a session, the subject of which was Applying Web 2.0: Leveraging Network Effects for Fun and Profit. I've been writing and speaking a lot lately on a core element of Web 2.0, namely network effects, and I've put a good edge on the material I think. It was early on Sunday so the turnout wasn't what I hoped for but the quality of the crowd more than made up for it including O'Reilly's Brady Forrest. Specifically, I've recently been researching precise ways of designing the invocation of widespread network effects directly into the architecture of a Web application. A key observation here is the understanding that a network effect is specifically caused by the triggering of new, active connections amongst the universe of potential connections on a network.
Interestingly, one implication I've uncovered is that a network effect can be either push or pull-based depending on the means used to trigger it. In other words, the entity desiring to deliberately (and sometimes not-so-deliberately) cause a network effect can enable it by pushing people towards the desired site or enabling a pull-mechanism to accomplish the same thing. In my session, I explored the specific techniques (see below for a list) for using push and pull mechanisms for causing new connections to be established and maintained between nodes on a network. Intentional or not, many of these techniques for embracing the power of networks have been used by sites like MySpace and YouTube for a considerable measure of success.
I'm still refining this rough list and some of these ways of establishing new connections on the network are still blurry as to whether they are push or pull. But the fact remains that understanding the best ways to explicitly leverage them is key to success on the Web. Given that the most compact definition of Web 2.0 is "networked applications that explicitly leverage network effects" and you can then realize the importance of this topic. Finding optimal, sustainable ways to create and maintain your effect on the network will become a sustainable advantage sooner that we might think, and so will scaling our systems to keep up with our successes. 
Wrapping Up FOO Camp 06After my session on network effects, I went to a good session on Web 2.0: Hype vs. Reality where most people in this highly Web-literate crowd seemed to be primarilyin violent agreement about the existence of Web 2.0, though to a lesser extent about its financial implications and future. All in all, it was amazing couple of days and I got to catch up with a great many folks that I know (Bill Scott, John Musser, Michael Arrington, Gabe Rivera, Dave McClure, Scott Guthrie, Chad Fowler, to name a few) and met a lot of new ones that I didn't. It was very nice to finally meet Paul Graham, who wrote a seminal essay on Web 2.0, as well as Ed Loper (who, like us other tent-free FOO Campers, crashed next to me on the 3rd floor along with a lot of other people that snored at least as much as I), and many others. A big thanks to the O'Reilly folks and Tim O'Reilly for great food, great conversation, and a very laid back time.
At the AjaxWorld Conference and Expo earlier this month, I gave my usual talk about how to formally leverage Web 2.0, with plenty of examples coming from things happening out on the Web. If you accept that it's the power and size of the Web today , particularly the number of highly interactive network nodes (who are mostly people), give them extremely low-barrier tools, and we should be able to find plenty examples of emergent behavior; significant events happening suddenly and unexpectedly. Tipping points are getting easier and easier to reach as site designers learn how to create better network effect triggers, draw large audiences suddenly, and as those same audiences increasingly self-organize spontaneously, such as in the KatrinaList project (suddenly) or Wikipedia (slower but bigger).And it's the arrival of Web 2.0 "supersites" like YouTube , which appear suddenly, often riding the coattails of other major Web 2.0 site's ecosystems, and apply aggressive, viral network effects that show us the true, full scale of the possibilities. Building a Web site worth over one billion dollars in 18 months is a very impressive result, but it's really only a single axis upon which Web 2.0 can be applied successfully. Another axis upon which to apply Web 2.0 focuses less on pulling in every single user possible with a horizontal network effect, but on building a difficult to reproduce but highly valuable data source, such as the Navteq mapping database, or Zillow's real estate database. One might argue that these are still very horizontal but these are merely just well known examples. The variety and depth of the Web is such that not every Web 2.0 site will have tens of millions of users, nor should it. An effective Web 2.0 site is largely powered by its users, whose feedback and contributions, direct and indirect, make the site a living ecosystem that evolves from day to day, a mosaic as rich and varied as a sites users would like it to be. In other words, creating a high quality architectures of participation is becoming a strategic competitive advantage in many areas. I'm often asked, particularly after one of my presentations on Web 2.0, to articulate the most important and effective actions a site designer can take to realize the benefits of Web 2.0. As a result, I've created the list below in a attempt to catpure a good, general purpose overview of what these steps are. My plan in the near future, is to dive into each one of these as much as time permits and explain how they make highly effective Web 2.0 sites not only effective, but often possible at all. In the meantime, please take them for what they're worth, I believe however that they are instrumental in making a Web site or application the most successful possible.The Essentials of Leveraging Web 2.0 Ease of Use is the most important feature of any Web site, Web application, or program. Open up your data as much possible. There is no future in hoarding data, only controlling it.Aggressively add feedback loops to everything. Pull out the loops that don’t seem to matter and emphasize the ones that give results.Continuous release cycles. The bigger the release, the more unwieldy it becomes (more dependencies, more planning, more disruption.) Organic growth is the most powerful, adaptive, and resilient.Make your users part of your software. They are your most valuable source of content, feedback, and passion. Start understanding social architecture. Give up non-essential control. Or your users will likely go elsewhere.Turn your applications into platforms. An application usually has a single predetermined use while a platform is designed to be the foundation of something much bigger. Instead of getting a single type of use from your software and data, you might get hundreds or even thousands of additional uses. Don’t create social communities just to have them. They aren’t a checklist item. But do empower inspired users to create them. Of course, there a lot of work in the details and these are just some of the important, general essentials. Unfortunately, a lot of careful thinking, planning, and engineering goes into any effective Web 2.0 site and it's having these ideas at the core of it, which can help you get the best results. Final Note: I'll be on the road the next two weeks and will be at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco from Nov. 7th-9th. I'll be there writing coverage for the Web 2.0 Journal and here as much as possible. If you're going to be there, please drop me a line if you'd like to meet. 
Along the way, the Web development community has learned a lot about Ajax including its strengths and weaknesses, appropriate uses, and its inevitable foibles. So to inaugurate the first print edition of a dedicated Ajax print periodical (see below for details), I thought I'd share my perspective on what I think we've learned in our 18 month journey to remake the face of the Web and the browser. Ajax has indeed helped give us the next major new platform for software, almost certainly forever surpassing our desktop operating systems as place we develop and use most of our software applications, consumer and business both. As always, this merely represents my opinion... What Every Software Project Needs to Know About Ajax The Browser Was Never Meant For Ajax. About a week into your first Ajax serious application you'll discover that Ajax pushes the browser nearly beyond its limits and there are definite lower engineering tolerances to get used to. The fact is, without powerful 3rd party development tools, designing clean Javascript software of any size requires some genuine discipline and effort. So too does Ajax debugging applications in multiple browsers (a real headache), and doing any serious background processing or threading can require heroic measures, particularly if you're mixing in other components that use the rather limited number of simultaneous timers available. The good news: Simple Ajax -- sprinkling in a little DHTML -- is much less daunting than Ajax In The Large. But be warned and be prepared to scale up your level of development and testing effort significantly with each doubling or trebling of your application size.You Won't Need As Many Web Services As You Think. I used to think that going the Ajax route required the development of a bunch of new Web services in order to feed the application data and provide a backing store. In reality, I'm finding a great many projects are quite happy to scrape HTML and/or use plain old HTTP POSTs to existing service endpoints that have no formal Web service structure. This is further turning the tide towards Ajax by making it very, very easy to "dip your toe" into Ajax development and reuse almost any preexisting HTTP service on the back end instead of SOAP or REST/WOA. While this can encourage poor architectural choices, it does make very incremental conversion to Ajax almost effortless and turns out to be a natural thing to do, though it can certainly lead to headaches later.Ajax Is More Involved Than Traditional Web Design and Development. The loss of HTML user interface conventions, the almost limitless potential for hidden or latent functionality, the programmatic creation of page elements instead of declarative, and other intrinsic aspects of the Ajax approach throw out much of what we know about Web design and development. Web designers must much more deeply understand the capabilities of the DOM, Javascript, CSS, and how the browser renders graphics, layouts, and elements. Developers find testing both difficult and tedious. Though tooling is continuing to improve across the board, it will take years for the industry to develop best practices, lore, patterns, and shared knowledge to make Web application development straightforward. Huge kudos to folks like Yahoo!'s Bill Scott for trying to fix many of these problems -- particularly the loss of GUI standards -- by actually moving the state of the art considerably forward with things like the Yahoo! UI Design Patterns library. The bottom line: Ajax development, at least for now, usually takes quite a bit longer than traditional Web development and requires a higher level of skill. Ajax Tooling and Components Are Still Emerging and There Is No Clear Leader Today. Though Dojo is getting one heck of a running start, the race is very far from over. For instance, the Dojo framework itself is still just at version 0.3. And close at its heels are an amazing range of tools, frameworks, and component libraries. Though OpenAjax will make this mosaic of products play nicer, most developers will get deep experience with two or three of them and stick with them. For now, I would say deeply committing to a particular product is usually not the best idea. Innovation, competition, and market leadership is likely going to bounce around for a while. In the meantime, be sure to check out script.aculo.us, Prototype, Google Web Toolkit, Yahoo! UI Library, JackBe, Zapatec, Bindows, Nexaweb, General Interface, Backbase, ActiveWidgets, and last but not least Microsoft Atlas. There are many others and I encourage you to look at Max Kiesler's roundup of 50 Ajax frameworks, with many others in the comments (and growing). Finally, Microsoft's Harry Pierson has diligently taken me to task for my Ajax spectrum comments, noting that Microsoft actually has more serious experience fostering an interoperable component community than just about anyone else.Good Ajax Programmers are Hard to Find. Zimbra's Scott Dietzen has lamented recently about the real difficulty in finding good Ajax talent. See point #3, but building sophisticated Ajax applications requires more computer science skills much more than it does Web design skills. And I find that experienced programmers tend not to enjoy Javascript programming and debugging. This too shall pass, but not for a few years, and not for a good while in the Bay Area. :-)One Must Actively Address Ajax's Constraints of the Browser Model. Though the final result can be very rewarding, Ajax is not a perfect Web development approach and it has a few genuine weaknesses. One is that it tends to break the model of the Web including preventing users from bookmarking content, breaking the use of the Back button, and more. Fortunately, smart folks like Brad Neuberg have addressed much of this, as long as you're willing to put out the effort and understand why it's important to recover this functionality. Ajax also lacks much of what still makes desktop software a strong contender; the ability to run disconnected from the network and access to local disk storage, though Flash local storage and the upcoming Apollo platform can help address this. Ajax Is Only One Element of a Successful RIA Strategy. As I've written before, the addition of RIA platforms such as Flex, OpenLaszlo, and WPF/E to a RIA strategy is virtually required to properly exploit the range of capabilities you'll want robust online applications to have. This is particularly true around rich media support such as audio and video -- which Ajax is virtually incapable of -- but even such mundane things as good printing support. These are all things that the more sophisticated Flash-based RIA platforms really shine at and are easier to program in to boot. Ajax will increasingly get a serious run for its money from these platforms, particularly as they provide back-end server support for things like server-side push, formal Web services, enterprise environments, and more.There are certainly other things software projects should know about Ajax but this is plenty of crucial food for thought. Looking ahead, we see the growing trend of in-browser mashups which is making the habit of combining pulling together -- entirely on the fly -- sets of Ajax components, Javascript snippets, and Flash widgets from all over the Web into a new set of often user-generated ad hoc software . Backed by the growing Global SOA , online Ajax components such as Google Maps, that can be referenced over the Web by a line of Javascript, and you have a recipe for an increasingly emphasis on assembly and glue instead of "green field" development of RIAs. This is an important use of the Web that I've called the "mashosphere " for the lack of a better term, which ushers in a whole new era of dependency and configuration management problems. The rich palette of software components and high value services on the Web will be a irresistable siren call for developers and expect more and more Ajax applications to be mashups in one form or another.But all of this talk of the evolution of Ajax does bring up some exciting new industry events... 
Announcing The Premier Issue of AjaxWorld Magazine - Print Edition 
Please do pardon the shameless self-promotion here at the end of this piece, but this is also important Ajax community news. I've been the editor-in-chief of SYS-CON's AjaxWorld Magazine for a while now and to herald the rise of Ajax, we've just expanded it to a full blown print magazine with the premier issue coming out at the all-star AjaxWorld Conference and Expo and Ajax Bootcamp next week in Santa Clara, California.For the cover story of the premier print issue, I worked with the OpenAjax Alliance -- a big thanks to IBM's Jon Ferraiolo and Joseph Becker -- to get a premium article series on both the strategic and technical direction of this significant and important new development in the Ajax world. OpenAjax holds the promise of true Ajax component interoperability, consistent tool support, and much more. I've urged Microsoft to consider joining -- they're one of the major holdouts -- and they've promised to seriously consider it after they get Atlas shipped, so hopefully we'll see nearly 100% industry support soon. Thus, the story of OpenAjax has been one of the bigger Ajax stories of the year as the number of vendors on board continues to grow in leaps and bounds, never mind the relatively light hand and welcome avoidance of a heavyweight standards approach to Ajax interoperability.I'll be blogging more about Ajax and less about Web 2.0 here in the next week or so as coverage of AjaxWorld and the many exciting announcements and information begins to flow forth.Happy Ajaxing and hope to see you next week in California!