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Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people uset hem. (This is what I've elsewhere called "harnessing collectivei ntelligence.")
Eric Schmidt has an even briefer formulation of this rule:"Don't fight the internet." That's actually a wonderful way to think about it. Think deeply about the way the internet works, and build systems and applications that use it more richly, freed from the constraints of PC-era thinking, and you're well on your way.
Watch this short video if you're a web 2.0 virgin.
Web 2.0 Design Patterns
(from Tim O'Reilly ) In 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."
The Long Tail
Small sites make up the bulk of the internet's content; narrow niches make up the bulk of internet's the possible applications. Therefore: Leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head.
Data is the Next Intel Inside
Applications are increasingly data-driven. Therefore: For competitive advantage, seek to own a unique, hard-to-recreate source of data.
Users Add Value
The key to competitive advantage in internet applications is the extent to which users add their own data to that which you provide. Therefore: Don't restrict your "architecture of participation" to software development. Involve your users both implicitly and explicitly in adding value to your application.
Network Effects by Default
Only a small percentage of users will go to the trouble of adding value to your application. Therefore: Set inclusive defaults for aggregating user data as a side-effect of their use of the application.
Some Rights Reserved. Intellectual property protection limits re-use and prevents experimentation. Therefore: When benefits come from collective adoption, not private restriction, make sure that barriers to adoption are low. Follow existing standards, and use licenses with as few restrictions as possible. Design for "hackability" and "remixability."
The Perpetual Beta
When devices and programs are connected to the internet, applications are no longer software artifacts, they are ongoing services. Therefore: Don't package up new features into monolithic releases, but instead add them on a regular basis as part of the normal user experience. Engage your users as real-time testers, and instrument the service so that you know how people use the new features.
Cooperate, Don't Control
Web 2.0 applications are built of a network of cooperating data services. Therefore: Offer web services interfaces and content syndication, and re-use the data services of others. Support lightweight programming models that allow for loosely-coupled systems.
Software Above the Level of a Single Device
The PC is no longer the only access device for internet applications, and applications that are limited to a single device are less valuable than those that are connected. Therefore: Design your application from the get-go to integrate services across handheld devices, PCs, and internet servers.
These four companies known for amazing innovation best demonstrate the essence of Web 2.0. Instead of suffering the fate of the other Dot Coms, they thrived through the downturn by leveraging the principles of Web 2.0. Their success is so widely known that it is now taken for granted, while their databases of customer information have become a growing privacy concern.
Google provides many characteristic Web 2.0 services: Blogger, Adsense, Maps, Search, Base, Gmail, GTalk, Reader, Statistics. Each of these services either exploit the read/write Web or the Web as Platform.
Amazon's Affiliates program, Reviews, People Who Bought This Also Bought..., and wish list sharing were early and influential Web 2.0 services. Their new Mechanical Turk service is another Web 2.0 gem.
eBay provides many buyer and seller services that aim for greater participation. Their API is one of the most successful, and the network effects they enjoy from their large user base are unrivaled.
New Exemplars of Web 2.0
These companies are by no means an exhaustive list, but are leading the pack. They provide popular software and services that have proved their worth among the competition.
Flickr is a fast-growing photosharing service that provides an collaborative user interface as well as a powerful API to it's content. (Recently acquired by Yahoo!)
Del.icio.us is a popular social bookmarking service. Joshua Schacter, the founder, characterizes his service as a way to remember things. (Recently acquired by Yahoo!)
Jotspot provides several services: Jotspot - the Application Wiki, which allows users to create and share wiki-like web pages. JotLive - a live group note-taking application.
Digg is a content aggregation service. It provides a mechanism for its many users to "digg" a piece of content, and aggregates them like votes to bubble up the most popular content to its widely-viewed pages. In this way Digg culls the actions of its users to provide value.
Feedburner is an RSS publishing service. Sites can direct their readers to a feed at Feedburner instead of hosting it themselves, taking advantage of Feedburner's advanced tracking capabilities to provide insight into who is reading your feed.
Open Sources. Voices from the Open Source Revolution. O'Reilly.
And the open Web services and SOAs that most of us are now building arealsoreally helping make this possible by lowering the impedance between oursystems.Thus, being able to readily combine all our services into rich newapplicationswill probably herald the long-awaited arrival of true software reuse(beyond theever ubiquitous cut-and-paste method that is).
Software reuse has been a holy grail of the industry for decades and this is one of the very reasons mashups are so fascinating.
Before we get to the predictions proper, let's focus for a minute on the underlying reasons for the mashup phenomenon. An important one is the advent of Web 2.0 concepts that encourage software creators to expose their applications as sets of reusable services. The theory is that you can be much more valuable to the rest of the world if your software can be reused in unintended ways. In other words, don't just provide a fully created end-product for one pre-intended use. Encourage others use the good pieces of what you provide in new and innovative ways.
the power of harnessing the innovation and output of your users will eclipse almost anything that centrally organized production could hope to match.
...a collaborative subset of Web 2.0, something referred to as Enterprise 2.0. Though the definition has continued to expand in some circles, Enterprise 2.0 describes the use of the latest freeform, emergent, social software tools that hold the promise to significantly improve the ways that we work together and collaborate. As an example, the liberal use of internal blogs and wikis with discoverable content frequently forms the foundation of an Enterprise 2.0 software strategy.
Both USA Today and the U.S. Patent and Trademark office have recently unveiled strategies for letting their users use two-way Web capabilities to contribute directly to the products and services they offer.
IT departments are showing considerably wariness for doing the same thing inside the firewall with employees, with over half being either skeptical or wary of the utility of Web 2.0 apps in the enterprise. The biggest concerns: Security, little expertise with Web 2.0 products, integration issues, and unclear ROI top the list. In other words, the group inside most organizations that's most familiar with IT and software, is thinking carefully before deploying things like Enterprise 2.0.
This is an interesting contrast, with a growing list of companies cautiously but clearly testing out the Web 2.0 waters with their customers while remaining largely on the fence for its use inside the enterprise. Certainly, many organizations likely believe that consumer facing sites that extensively leverage user generated content, mass participation, and social networking have been proved to work on a large scale by sites like MySpace and YouTube. And that organizations have already purchased and deployed countless IT tools that were already designed support internal business processes, ad hoc collaboration, and information capture and storage.
Go2Web20.net as of 4/2/07
Another probably contributor to the increasing use of customer-facing Web 2.0 applications by large organizations is simple competitive pressure. This is something that IT departments have only recently started facing in a serious fashion with outsourcing and other budget diversions in the enterprise as business units decide that they can do better by pitting their internal IT suppliers with external ones. Thus, because of industry competition, a company's external products tend to improve faster and be more innovative since the concern over the displacement and dislocation of falling behind one's competitive peers is often pronounced in many industries. Competition is usually much less, and often non-existent, for internal IT products.
See Crowdsourcing it's become relatively apparent then that Web 2.0 can give us tools that make the struggle between centrally produced content and user produced content a no-brainer: users can usually do far more with far less that we can with our dedicated business infrastructures. From this perspective, the advantages are clear: getting anywhere from to a few thousand to tens of millions of people shaping, contributing, and organization your products and services instead of just your employees. You might not need as many employees either.
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