Dion Hinchcliffe's Web 2.0 Blog

Links for 2009-11-18 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 PST

Windows Azure opens for business on Jan. 1, 2010 | Betanews
Microsoft's OS in the clouds, http://Azure.com, will now ship 1st of the year. First month free. http://bit.ly/3llLst [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5805084470]

Links for 2009-11-17 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 PST

5 Impressive Real-Life Google Wave Use Cases
5 Impressive Real-Life Google Wave Use Cases: http://bit.ly/2PFtKy [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5795516903]
About Mashups and Linked Data | Mashstream
Mashups and Linked Data: http://bit.ly/3hMrd2 Good primer with latest issues. [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5796317657]
What Enterprise Architecture Brings to the Business | Interviews | ITBusinessEdge.com
What Enterprise Architecture Brings to the Business: http://bit.ly/49s1wf [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5796746608]
InfoWorld's top 10 emerging enterprise technologies
InfoWorld's top 10 emerging enterprise technologies: http://bit.ly/416YD1 Data management, noSQL, new flavors of virtualization abound. [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5797375451]
http://www.pmcluster.com/Prediction%20Markets/Documents/social-innov.pdf
RT @sagenet Outstanding talk by Rami Levy "Socialized Innovation: Tapping into Motorola's Collective Intelligence" http://bit.ly/3HMy8h [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5804307957]

Links for 2009-11-16 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 PST

Preparing The Workforce E20summit Short
RT @ITSinsider @gyehuda's preso from #e20s http://is.gd/4TMPk [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5674753835]
Dreamforce 09 : The Cloud Computing Event of the Year - salesforce.com
Up early to do a TV spot then head to the Pentagon. The big event this week is http://dreamforce.com in SF. The "cloud event of the year." [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5762767041]
8 Ways to Use SharePoint for Social Computing - Digital Landfill
RT @jmancini77 8 Ways to Use SharePoint for Social Computing http://bit.ly/1EtDCa [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5762819822]
AT&T intros cloud computing service
IBM makes a big move to build a smarter cloud http://bit.ly/1CNfv6 while AT&T enters the cloud computing space today: http://bit.ly/Sh9N5 [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5762996477]
IBM's new service jumps on cloud computing bandwagon| Technology| Reuters
IBM makes a big move to build a smarter cloud http://bit.ly/1CNfv6 while AT&T enters the cloud computing space today: http://bit.ly/Sh9N5 [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5762996477]
InfoQ: The Top 10 SOA Myths Revisited
RT @soaguru The Top 10 SOA Myths Revisited http://bit.ly/qwZNi (via @aspectize) [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5764454451]
Don't Soft Pedal the Enterprise 2.0 Message - The Connected Web
Don't Soft Pedal the Enterprise 2.0 Message says @philww: http://bit.ly/4qH3D4 [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5764936699]
Enterprise mashup, defined | Service-Oriented Architecture | ZDNet.com
Enterprise mashup, defined: http://bit.ly/3MP6Xh by @jackbe from @joemckendrick [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5767166345]
Twitpic - Share photos on Twitter
Just finished taping a video on social computing and operational responsiveness for Progress. Link soon. http://twitpic.com/pra36 [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5767302060]
Let's Move Away From Social Media and Get Down to Business - ReadWriteEnterprise
Nice. @rww had a good bit recently on how we're trying to bring maturity to Enterprise 2.0: http://bit.ly/1Fqr4x [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5771945596]
Resistance to change: The real Enterprise 2.0 barrier | IT Project Failures | ZDNet.com
RT @mkrigsman Resistance to change: The real Enterprise 2.0 barrier http://bit.ly/iz6xJ < In the end, it's usually a people problem [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5772142739]
IndustryWeek : Top 10 IT Strategies for 2010
Top 10 IT Strategies for 2010: http://bit.ly/2DbZWO Good list but no real surprises: Cloud, social, mobile, etc. [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5774152674]

Links for 2009-11-12 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 PST

Go Dog Go – Google Open Sources New Prog… « /SAbackchan
RT @Furrier Google News: Go Dog Go - Google Announces Open Source Programming Language GO http://bit.ly/4xwJKJ [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5603167323]
Twitpic - Share photos on Twitter
Listening to @k_kristensen talk about collaborative performance with E2.0 at #e20s. @swardley on left. http://twitpic.com/p3hab [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5615688908]
Twitpic - Share photos on Twitter
Now @jnestour is speaking about the real challenges of Enterprise 2.0 adoption. @leebryant on left. #e20s http://twitpic.com/p3jc5 [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5616210789]
socialsoftwarematrix.org
RT @fwhamm: Frank Wolf shows http://socialsoftwarematrix.org #e20s (via @gyehuda) [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5616347550]
Twitpic - Share photos on Twitter
Slide details on how to calculate weighted E2.0 (ROA) business returns by @jnestour. #e20s http://twitpic.com/p3kcl [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5616469256]
Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT, Frankfurt am Main, 2009
RT @k_kristensen My #e20s deck "Measuring Collaborative Performance - Due Diligence for Enterprise 2.0" on Slideshare: http://bit.ly/3VN6Ji [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5616720302]
Enterprise Mashups in Major Transition
RT @webtechman Enterprise 2.0: Mashups in Major Transition http://bit.ly/pNAux Reducing Integration costs & empowering users. #E20 #FAV [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5617299815]
http://www.darkreading.com/security/client/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=221601083
RT @glfceo: Enterprise Adoption Of Social Networking, Collaborative Apps Jumps Worldwide http://bit.ly/2gVhno #e20 [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5645748087]
Enterprise 2.0: What do we know today about moving our organizations into the 21st century? | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com
Social Computing: What do we know today about moving our organizations into the 21st century? | Enterprise Web 2.0 http://bit.ly/12bSOW [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5647836057]
The Rise of Enterprise 2.0 - Expert Voices
The Rise of Enterprise 2.0: http://bit.ly/46D0te Good new CIO Insight interview with @amcafee [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5648037338]
Enterprise 2.0 Summit 2009 Closing Keynote by Dion Hinchcliffe
I uploaded to Slideshare the deck I used for the Enterprise 2.0 Summit 2009 Closing Keynote today: http://bit.ly/1I4qk7 #e20s [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5661464646]

Links for 2009-11-10 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:00 PST

Social customer service
Good piece by @mfauscette on Social Customer Service: http://bit.ly/2nOmo5 [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5564274574]
http://bit.ly/7udsT
New Cisco Collaboration Software Takes On Microsoft, IBM | Forbes http://bit.ly/7udsT [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5564493126]
CHART OF THE DAY: Why Google Dropped $750 Million On AdMob (GOOG, AAPL)
RT @GeorgeDearing "CHART OF THE DAY: Why Google Dropped $750 Million On AdMob" http://ff.im/-bdbqB < Good move to own the iPhone ad biz [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5570198127]
Arriving at Le Meridien in Frankfurt to kickoff workshop day ... on Twitpic
http://twitpic.com/oz7cg - Arriving at Le Meridien in Frankfurt to kickoff workshop day at #e20s. [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5584113769]
Google Moderator
Please participate in our E2.0 workshop live from the Web by submitting questions on social computing topics: http://bit.ly/e20s_mc #e20s [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5584363065]

Links for 2009-11-05 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:00 PST

Yfrog - e8qk - Uploaded by itsinsider
RT @rlavigne42 Great Group Pic of @ITSinsider, @olivermarks, @sameerpatel, @dhinchcliffe. http://yfrog.com/0le8qkj #e2conf VIPparty [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5448745492]
Portals and KM: Forrester's Top 15 Technology Trends for Enterprise Architects
RT @BillIves my post on Forrester Top 15 Technology Trends for Enterprise Architects http://bit.ly/1Vd3Dk [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5449969180]

Links for 2009-11-04 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 PST

Official Google Blog: Google Friend Connect, now more personalized
Google tries to "break the ice" with Friend Connect: http://bit.ly/4kecNb IMO it still seems they don't get the social Web. [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5424577078]
The Content Economy: ECM in the age of the social web - new slide deck
RT @oscarberg Blogged: ECM in the age of the social Web - new slide deck http://bit.ly/pGLIJ [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5428892432]
Exploring Early Enterprise 2.0 Methodologies | Enterprise 2.0 Conference West 2009
The slides for my #e2conf session on Exploring Early Enterprise 2.0 Methodologies are now up on Slideshare: http://bit.ly/3EuGwU [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5430029399]
Twitpic - Share photos on Twitter
Talking with @bodell, Forrester's @drnatalie, and Helpstream's @bobwarfield at #e2conf right now. Photo: http://twitpic.com/oahva [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5432889103]
403 Forbidden
RT @membrado http://CubeTree.com won Launchpad. Congratulations! http://twiki.net 2nd, http://Xwiki.com 3rd, Garland group 4th #e2conf [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5432997941]
Twiki Enterprise Agility Platform
RT @membrado http://CubeTree.com won Launchpad. Congratulations! http://twiki.net 2nd, http://Xwiki.com 3rd, Garland group 4th #e2conf [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5432997941]
Enterprise Social Software | Wikis, Microblogging & Feeds - CubeTree
RT @membrado http://CubeTree.com won Launchpad. Congratulations! http://twiki.net 2nd, http://Xwiki.com 3rd, Garland group 4th #e2conf [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/5432997941]

The Evolving Web In 2009: Web Squared Emerges To Refine Web 2.0

Dion Hinchcliffe — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 20:01:00 GMT

It's been five years now that we've begun to understand what Web 2.0 is, starting way back in 2003. It's been a fairly impressive if winding road as a new online generation was born. But far from getting long in the tooth, along the way Web 2.0 became vitally important -- even central in some cases -- to the very future of global culture and business. Oh certainly, sometimes we get tired of the term itself, and admittedly it doesn't describe something necessarily new anymore, but what we just do these days. But the concepts identified as Web 2.0 have proved to be highly insightful, even prescient, and are used around the world daily to guide everything from product development to the future of government.

It has been today's commonplace use of intensely popular and deeply pervasive social networks, the outright transformation of industries such as media and software, and the growing dominance of 2.0 techniques such as user generated content, open business methods, crowdsourcing, Enterprise 2.0, open APIs -- in the business world and elsewhere -- which has been striking, even if there's a long way to go in some quarters. Indeed, Web 2.0 is not just here to stay, it seems to be a revolution that just keeps on rolling and giving us, as I often say in my talks, an amazingly resourceful and resilient new lens with which to 1) look at the world and 2) the network that now surrounds it, and 3) the opportunities between the two.

Now, to paraphrase Churchill, "Now this is not the end. ... But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning" of Web 2.0, many are starting to perceive deeper patterns and concepts within Web 2.0 practices. We can perhaps now see more clearly the next steps towards what some would like to call Web 3.0, and which Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle have decided to dub Web Squared, the deeper explanation of which you can find here on the Web 2.0 Summit site. Whether we need a new term and whether Web Squared will be as accepted, or at least as widely repeated, as Web 2.0 is perhaps unlikely but it nevertheless is a cogent, if necessarily, incomplete next progression. What is certain is, that like Web 2.0, the ideas within it are useful new strategic ones that are emerging from the countless practical experiences of Internet practitioners everywhere in the world's largest living laboratory: The Internet.

At its core, the message is that the Web is becoming more autonomic, reflective, real-time, generative, and open while at the same time far more deeply embedded everywhere in the fabric of our environment. And like what came before it, Web Squared is likely to have profound impact to the societies and organizations, either way, that choose to understand it or ignore it.

What is Web Squared?

While this is my personal take, Web Squared articulates a broader fusion between the world-at-large, the Web, and the people connected to it. It's a more extreme view of Web 2.0 while at the same time hinting that while social computing has been a major transformative force recently in the consumer world and beyond, the's relentless growth of devices, network connectivity, and sensors into our lives across our homes, workplaces, and external environment is casting an growing "information shadow" that is increasingly hard to ignore. At first glance this can seem to be an impersonal and inhuman concept as the network expands to surround everything and dominate the participation that so far at least is still driven (for a little bit longer anyway) by what people do and contribute online. However, this bleak vision is tempered by the realization that far from being pushed to the side, we collectively must be the feedback loop that guides Web Squared through billions of daily interactions that makes it possible in the first place. It's the full environment, including us, which makes it all work.

The comparison above gives a cleaner, most succinct sense of what Web Squared is by comparing it to Web 1.0 and classic Web 2.0. It's not necessarily a generation beyond Web 2.0 since many of the concepts are simply more refined or focused. But the "knobs" on many Web 2.0 ideas like collective intelligence, feedback loops, network effects, and so on are turned up quite a bit more and are fueled more directly by our interactions with the world as well as our synthesis of it. We know now how to sharpen the scalpels that we use to design our online businesses a good bit better and Web Squared reflects this.

For my own part, it's a useful evolution of Web 2.0 even if it's not quite as dramatically transformative culturally. However, the implications in terms of the types of new businesses that will be created have the potential to be as potent as Google (or even more so) when it comes to cornering the market on new classes of data and therefore entire industries, since most winners in on the online space have outsized dominance of their sectors. You want to use Web 2.0 ideas for the most impact? Think in terms of Web Squared.

I'll be exploring the concepts of Web Squared in further depth here as I am able, but it's clear that we need to take what we've learned in the Web 2.0 era and focus on emerging techniques that seem particular promising. In particular, I think the key aspect of Web Squared will lie in teaching our applications to "learn inferentially" from our online product's strategic sets of data and drive out previously hidden value. That's where being able to create powerful new autonomic, environmentally-connected, database-driven applications, often from ecosystems of partners that will provide access to their data (for a price), has the potential to become a dominant new growth model for modern Web apps. Whether this is video search engines built on top of YouTube's content, near real-time language translation using peer production in social communities, or just better product/content recommendation engines remains to be seen.

But the chances are just as likely that entirely new types of break-out products will be created that we can only barely imagine today, like we did with Web 2.0 just a few short years ago. These new applications will fully harness the Web of data powered by insightful and potent cooperative algorithms and novel integration strategies that are deeply connected to the world we live in. Developing these generative algorithms will be the central challenge for a new era of product designer. These product designers will be experts at developing interactive systems for drawing insight, collecting data, and creating value from instantaneous Web input. We can look to examples such as the Netflix Prize as successful models for distributed, open design "studios" for creating, validating, and identifying the winners. How we look at fostering innovation and harvesting it is being reshaped by this vision already.

One thing is for certain, however, the way we look at the network is in the process of taking another big leap.

I'd like to get together a list of Web Squared example applications and ideas. Please leave your suggestions and comments below.

Web 2.0 Architectures: What Entrepreneurs and Architects Need to Know

Dion Hinchcliffe — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:06:00 GMT

It's been a long time in coming and it's a subject that has seen far too little serious treatment, either in traditional media or online. And that is the overarching design of Web 2.0 applications. This is a topic that as a practicing enterprise architect, along with many other hats, is near and dear to me and I've covered many times over the years here, on ZDNet, and my talks at conferences (see below for videos for some of these).

So it's official, our new book Web 2.0 Architectures is now out from O'Reilly as of this month. You can find it in your local bookstore or online. Early feedback has been excellent including a stellar early review from JBoss CTO Mark Little. Amazon UK nearly sold out almost immediately and we're making it standard issue for the architecture course at Web 2.0 University.

I should be clear from the outset that this book will be most useful for those coming at Web 2.0 from the traditional software and IT side of things. While anyone trying to create modern Web 2.0 applications will certainly benefit from the thinking and perspectives in the book, it takes an approach that will be very familiar with those in classical software development and enterprise application architecture. The book includes many key Web 2.0 architectures in design pattern form (in fact, the book was originally entitled Web 2.0 Design Patterns) using a service-based, layered view of software that will be eminently familiar with SOA architects and software engineers.

I'd like to thank my co-authors Duane Nickull and James Governer, who put up with my busy schedule without complaint, as well as the publisher O'Reilly and seemingly tireless editor Steve Weiss, who both stuck with us through many iterations. Read Duane's announcement post of the book for additional background.

Building on top of the foundational material in the book, readers will also likely find these writings and video on Web 2.0 Architecture useful in their work, many of which were either inputs to the book or subsequently written and enrich what it has to offer. I've handpicked the ones that have been enormously popular over the years with hundreds of thousands of readers.

Essential Readings and Media on Web 2.0 Architectures

Hacking the Web's Network Effect. Every powerful technological approach can be used for both positive or negative results and the argument can be made that pure technology essentially amoral. In particular, network effects are especially potent ways of leveraging the value of networked applications and I explore how they can be used for good or ill. The appreciation of network effects is something that most software architects are not familiar with still today.
Is Web 2.0 The Global SOA? I began to see the marked similarities (and differences) between Web 2.0 and SOA and began to explore this in some detail. This received wide coverage in the blogosphere and eventually evolved to become my regular blog on ZDNet and a cover story in the SOA/Web Services Journal.
Tolerance And Experience Continuums. As the first major Web 2.0 applications began to flourish the idea that small pieces, loosely joined would result in better products and innovation in assembly began to be borne out, particularly with mashups and open APIs. In this piece I take a look at how our heavyweight, complex, and monolithic software design in the traditional world was a solution that was often on the wrong site of the tolerance curve.
A Timeless Way of Building Software. I take a look at how the development of major software systems, particularly networked ones, have had the same essential design concerns, it's just a matter of emphasis. This material made it into the book with an homage to Christopher Alexander's work on patterns. I lay out the major design concerns of all software and show where SOA and things like Web 2.0 fall on the map.
Open Services That Last And Anyone Can Use. The early offers of open APIs and lightweight public SOA, which have been instrumental in helping many of the newer Web startups such as Twitter be particulary successful, had an uncertain landscape in which to provide their services, not knowing the best way to expose them. That's much clearer now but I took a look at the full range of options.
Web 2.0 and SOA: Contrived or Converging. I delve deeper into the apparent entanglements between Web 2.0 and service-oriented architecture, a subject that became increasingly apparent was a major topic. This culminated into many vital architectural discussions at every level of the subject, from the bottom, with Web-Oriented Architecture to top with the emerging social layer.
Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA). This become a more important topic as RESTful architectures began to become more popular and more interesting to the software development community in general. This is my most definitional work, but there were many others including my discussions of WOA and traditional SOA as well as my original research on creating effective REST clients which was published in the Microsoft Architecture Journal.
The Co-Evolution of SOA and Web 2.0 and The story of Web 2.0 and SOA continues. I do my most complete definition in detail of the concrete tie-ins between the models of Web 2.0 and SOA, which have more in common than they do differences. SOA is essentially the most common approach to building traditional software systems today while Web 2.0 is the leading approach online, the differences are really in emphasis, barring a few true differences.
Deconstructing Web 2.0 to the Next Level. Exploring Web 2.0 by describing it with patterns began when I first met Duane Nickull and made the video included in this post the day we became acquainted. This eventually led to the collaboration that resulted in this book (which was originally called Web 2.0 Design Patterns.) Be sure to watch the video, it has a good complete discussion of the topic of Web 2.0, patterns, and traditional software development.
Architectures of Participation: The Next Big Thing. This is largely missing as a formal software development discipline and traditional software lacks for this element. I explore how in the future the best software well have well tuned Architectures of Participation.
Next-Generation Web 2.0 Applications. Over the last few years Web 2.0 applications have become more and more sophisticated, but even understanding what a "Web 2.0 Stack" is has been poorly defined. I unbox it in a layered description including social, distribution, and 3rd party sourcing as explicit tiers in and of themselves.
Distribution Models for Modern Web Applications. Being successful on a large, crowded network requires using all the models for reach that are available, from syndication to Web services (open APIs), widgets, and more. I explore how modern Web applications have evolved highly sophisticated new ways to reach their users, whether they are partners or customers.
Cloud Computing And The Return Of the Platform Wars. We're seeing the emergence of another new architectural model from the Web and it's poses challenges for traditional software models again. Here are some of the opportunities and issues especially as platform lock-in and standards are going to be a major issue.
Transforming Software Architecture with Web as Platform. I gave a keynote at QCon in London earlier this year and I covered many of the major transformations taking place in architecture today and how it's being driven by the Web including open platforms, productivity-oriented frameworks such as Rails and Grails, non-relational databases, as well as cloud computing and more. Video and slides are included. You can also read my Top 10 Must-Know Topics for Software Architects in 2009 for additional details.
There Goes Everyone: Web 2.0 Expo Europe Keynote. This is good for understanding the challenges we have before us as architects and business people. While not technical, it's a good overview of the urgency we have in changing from older ways of doing things, which aren't working very well, to new models for using the network for better outcomes in our software, business, culture, and society:

Please add your own good links to Web 2.0 architecture topics below.

50 Essential Strategies For Creating A Successful Web 2.0 Product

Dion Hinchcliffe — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 18:39:00 GMT

I am fortunate enough to spend a lot of time looking at various online products and services in the development stage, mostly of the Web 2.0 variety, meaning they use one or more of the principles in the Web 2.0 set of practices. It's been going on 4 years now and what's fascinating to me, despite the enormous amount of knowledge that we've accumulated on how to create modern Web applications, is how many of the same lessons are learned over and over again.

Wouldn't it be handy if we had a cheat sheet that combined many of these lessons into one convenient list? In this vein of thinking, I decided to sit down recently to capture are some of the most important lessons I've learned over the last few years along with some of the thinking that went into them.

The Web Community Gets Smarter Every Time It Builds A Product

If there's one thing that the Web has taught us it's that the network gets smarter by virtue of people using it and product development is no exception. Not only do we have examples of great online applications and systems to point to and use for best practices, but the latest tools, frameworks, development platforms, APIs, widgets, and so on, which are largely developed today in the form of open source over the Internet, tend to accumulate many of these new best practices. I've lauded everything from frameworks like Rails, Cake PHP, and Grails to online community platforms like Drupal and Joomla as examples of guiding solutions that can be vital springboards for the next great Web product or service.

However, most of the success of an online product, Web 2.0 or otherwise, comes from two things: Its software architecture and its product design. It's also the case that the story of any product is a story of ten of thousands of little decisions made throughout the life of the product, of which only a key -- and heartbreakingly small -- set will make much of a difference to its success on the network. The list of strategies below tells part of the story of which decisions will make that critical difference.

What then is software architecture and product design when it comes to today's Web applications? The good news: They're often the same as they've always been, albeit just a bit more extreme, though there are some additions for the 2.0 era as well:

Software architecture determines a Web application's fundamental structure and properties: Resilience, scalability, adaptability, reliability, changeability, maintainability, extensibility, security, technology base, standards compliance, and other key constraints, and not necessarily in that order.
Product design determines a Web application's observable function: Usability, audience, feature set, capabilities, functionality, business model, visual design, and more. Again, not necessarily in priority order.

Doing both of these top-level product development activities well, striking a healthy balance between them (one often dominates the other), and doing it with a small team, requires people with deep and multidisciplinary backgrounds in creating successful products across this extensive set of practice areas. These people are often hard to find and extremely valuable. This means it's also not likely you'll be able to easily put together a team with all the capabilities that are needed from the outset.

Be prepared from the outset for on-the-job learning and study, relying on tools and products that embody best practices, and replicating only the best designs and ideas (while being very conscientious not to steal IP.)

In this way, I've collected a set of strategies that address the most common issues that I see come up over and over again as online products go to market. I've decided to share these with you so we can continue to teach the network, and consequently ourselves, a little bit more about how to make extraordinary Web applications that can really make a difference in the marketplace.

This of course is just my experience and is not intended to be a complete list of Web 2.0 strategies. However, I think most people will find it a valuable perspective and useful cross check in their product design and development. And please keep in mind this list is for Web 2.0 applications, not necessary static Web sites, or traditional online Web presence, though there is much that here that can be applied to them to make them more useful and successful as well.

Finally, a good number of these strategies are not specifically Web 2.0 concepts. They are on the list because they are pre-requisites to many Web 2.0 approaches and to any successful product created with software and powered by people.

Please add your own strategies in comments below for anything that I've missed.

50 Strategies For Creating A Successful Web 2.0 Product

1. Start with a simple problem. All of the most successful online services start with a simple premise and execute on it well with great focus. This could be Google with it's command-line search engine, Flickr with photo sharing, Digg with user generated news. State your problem simply: "I make it easier to do X". Focus on solving it elegantly and simply, only add features carefully. Over time, complexity will become the enemy of both your product design and your software architecture, so start with as much focus as you can muster.

2. Create prototypes as early as possible. Get your idea into a working piece of software as quickly as possible. The longer you take to go through one entire cycle, the more unknown work you have ahead of you. Not producing software also means that you are not getting better and better at turning the work of your team into the most important measurable output: Functioning software. Throughout the life of your product, turning your ideas into software as quickly and inexpensively as possible will be one of the most important activities to get right.

3. Get people on the network to work with the product prototype rapidly and often. The online world today is fundamentally people-centric. If your product isn't about them and how it makes their lives better, your product really doesn't matter. And if they're not using your Web application as soon as possible, you just don't know if you are building the right product. Constant, direct feedback from real people is the most important input to our product design after your idea. Don't wait months for this to happen; get a beta out to the world, achieve marketplace contact in weeks, or at most a few months, and watch carefully what happens. This approach is sometimes called Web 2.0 Development .

4. Release early and release often. Don't get caught up in the massive release cycle approach, no matter how appealing it may be. Large releases let you push off work tomorrow that should be done today. It also creates too much change at once and often has too many dependencies, further driving an increase in the size of the release. Small releases almost always work better, are easier to manage, but can require a bit more operations overhead. Done right, your online product will iterate smoothly as well as improve faster and more regularly than your competitors. Some online products, notably Flickr, have been on record as saying they make new releases to production up to several times a day. This is a development velocity that many new startups have trouble appreciating or don't know how to enable. Agile software development processes are a good model to start with and and these and even more extreme methods have worked well in the Web 2.0 community for years.

5. Manage your software development and operations to real numbers that matter. One often unappreciated issue with software is its fundamentally intangible nature. Combine that with human nature, which is to manage to what you can see, and you can have a real problem. There is a reason why software development has such a variable nature in terms of time, budget, and resources. Make sure you have as many real numbers as possible to manage to: Who is making how many commits a week to the source repository, how many registered users are there on a daily basis, what does the user analytics look like, which product features are being used most/least this month, what are the top 5 complaints of customers, and so on. All of these are important key performance indicators that far too many startups don't manage and respond to as closely as they should.

6. Gather usage data from your users and input it back into product design as often as possible. Watch what your users do live with your product, what they click on, what do they try to do with it, what they don't use, and so on. You will be surprised; they will do things you never expected, have trouble with features that seem easy to you, and not understand parts of your product that seemed obvious. Gather this data often and feed it back into your usability and information architecture processes. Some Web applications teams do this almost daily, others look at click stream analytics once a quarter, and some don't it at all. Guess who is shaping their product faster and in the right direction?

7. Put off irreversible architecture and product design decisions as long as possible. Get in the habit of asking "How difficult will it be to change our mind about this later?" Choosing a programming language, Web framework, relational database design, or a software interface tend to be one-way decisions that are hard to undo. Picking a visual design, logo, layout, or analytics tool generally is not. Consequently, while certain major decisions must be made up front, be vigilant for seemingly innocuous decisions that will be difficult to reverse. Not all of these will be a big deal, but it's all too often a surprise to many people when they discover their architecture isn't malleable in the places that they want it to be. Reduce unpleasant surprises by always asking this question.

8. Choose the technologies later and think carefully about what your product will do first. First, make sure your ideas will work on the Web. I've seen too many startups with ideas that will work in software but not on the Web. Second, Web technologies often have surprising limits, Ajax can't do video or audio, Flash is hard to get to work with SEO for example. Choosing a technology too early will constrain what is possible later on. That being said, you have to choose as rapidly as you can within this constraint since you need to build prototypes and the initial product as soon as you are able.

9. When you do select technologies, consider current skill sets and staff availability. New, trendy technologies can have major benefits including higher levels of productivity and compelling new capabilities, but it also means it'll be harder to find people who are competent with them. Having staff learn new technology on the job can be painful, expensive, and risky. Older technologies are in a similar boat; you can find people that know them but they'll most likely not want to work with them. This means the middle of the road is often the best place to be when it comes to selecting technology, though you all-too-often won't have a choice depending on what your staff already knows or because of the pre-requisites of specific technologies that you have to use.

10. Balance programmer productivity with operational costs. Programming time is the most expensive part of product creation up front while operations is after you launch. Productivity-oriented platforms such as Ruby on Rails are very popular in the Web community to drive down the cost of product development but can have significant run-time penalties later when you are supporting millions of users. I've previously discussed the issues and motivations around moving to newer programming languages and platforms designed for the modern Web, and I encourage you to read it. Productivity-oriented platforms tend to require more operational resources during run-time, and unlike traditional software products, the majority of the cost of operations falls upon the startup. Be aware of the cost and scale of the trade-offs since every dollar you save on the development productivity side translates into a run-time cost forever after on the operations side.

11. Variability in the productivity amongst programmers and development platforms each varies by an order of magnitude. Combined together and your choice of programming talent and software development platforms can result in a 100x overall effect on product development productivity. This means that some teams can ship product in as little as 3 months and some projects won't ship ever, at least not without truly prohibitive time and resource requirements. While there are a great many inputs to an Internet startup that will help or hinder it (take a look at Paul Graham's great 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups for a good list), these are two of the most central and variable: Who is developing the product and what development platform they are using. Joel Spolsky's write-up on programmer productivity remains one of the best at understanding this issue. It usually turns out that paying a bit more for the right developer can often mean tremendous output gains. One the other side of the coin, choosing a development platform not designed for creating modern Web applications is another decision that can sap your team of productivity while they spend months retrofitting it for the features they'll need to make it work properly in today's Internet world.

12. Plan for testing to be a larger part of software development process than non-Web applications. Cross browser testing, usability, and performance/load testing are much bigger issues with Web applications than many non-Web applications. Having to do thorough testing in a half-dozen to a dozen browser types can be an unexpected tax on the time and cost of creating a Web product. Doing adequate load testing is another item that often waits until the end, the very worst time to find where the bottlenecks in your architecture are. Plan to test more than usual. Insist on automated unit and integration tests that build up over time and run without having to pay developers or testers to do it manually.

13. Move beyond traditional application hosting. Single Web-server hosting models are not going to suffice for your 2.0 applications. Reliability, availability, and scalability are essential and must be designed into your run-time architecture and supported by your hosting environment. Solutions like 3Tera, Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, and Google's App Engine are three compelling, yet very different solutions to the hosting problem. Either way, grid and cloud approaches to hosting will help you meet your growth and scalability requirements while managing your costs.

14. Have an open source strategy. This has two important aspects. One, developing and hosting a product built with open source software (the ubiquitious LAMP stack) is almost always much less expensive than using commercial software and is what most online products use. There are certainly commercial licenses that have fair terms for online services, but almost none of them will match the cost of free. This is one reason why you won't find Windows or Oracle embedded in very many Web 2.0 services. Two, you'll have to decide whether to open source or commercial open source your product. This has entirely to do with what your product does and how it does it, but an increasing number of Web 2.0 hosted products are releasing their offerings as open source to appeal to customers, particularly if they are business customers. Done right, open sourcing can negate arguments about the size of your company while enlisting many 3rd party developers to help enrich and make your product better.

15. Consider mobile users as important as your regular browser customers. Mobile devices will ultimately form the majority of your user base as the capability and adoption of smartphones, Internet tablets, laptops, and netbooks ushers in mobile Web use as the dominant model. Having an application strategy as well as well-supported applications for the iPhone, Android, and RIM platforms is essential for most Web products these days. By the time you get to market, mobile will be even more important than it is now. Infoworld confirmed today, in fact, that wireless enterprise development will be one of 2009's bright spots.

16. Search is the new navigation, make it easy to use in your application. You have 5-10 seconds for a new user to find what they want from your site or application. Existing users want to directly access what they need without going through layers of menu items and links. Search is the fastest way to provide random access navigation. Therefore, offer search across data, community, and help at a minimum. A search box must be on the main page and indeed, every page of the modern Web application.

17. Whenever users can provide data to your product, enable them. Harnessing collective intelligence is the most central high-level principle of Web 2.0 applications. To be a major online competitor, getting your millions of users to build a valuable data set around the clock is the key to success. Many product designers look at this too narrowly and usually at a small set of data. Keep a broad view of this and look for innovative ways to get information from explicit contributions to the database of intentions can form your architecture of participation.

18. Offer an open API so that your Web application can be extended by partners around the world. I've covered this topic many times in the past and if you do it right, your biggest customers will soon become 3rd party Web applications building upon your data and functionality. Critically, offering an API converts your online product into an open platform with an ecosystem of 3rd party partners. This is just one of many ways to realize Jakob's law, as is the next item.

19. Make sure your product can be spread around the Web by users, provide widgets, badges, and gadgets. If your application has any success at all, your users will want to take it with them and use your features elsewhere. This is often low-effort but can drive enormous growth and adoption; think about YouTube's badge.

20. Create features to make the product distribute virally. The potency of this is similar to widgets above and everything from simple e-mail friend invites to importing contact lists and social graphs from other Web apps are critical ways to ensure that a user can bring the people they want into the application to drive more value for them and you.

21. The link is the fundamental unit of thought on the Web, therefore richly link-enable your applications. Links are what make the Web so special and fundamentally makes it work. Ensuring your application is URL addressable in a granular way, especially if you have a rich user experience, is vital to participate successfully on the Web. The Web's link ecosystem is enormously powerful and is needed for bookmarking, link sharing/propagation, advertising, makes SEO work, drives your page rank, and much more. Your overall URL structure should be thought out and clean, look to Flickr and del.cio.us for good examples.

22. Create an online user community for your product and nurture it. Online communities are ways to engage passionate users to provide feedback, support, promotion, evangelism and countless other useful outcomes. While this is usually standard fare now with online products, too many companies don't start this early enough or give it enough resources despite the benefits it confers in terms of customer support, user feedback, and free marketing, to name just three benefits. Investing in online community approaches is ultimately one of the least expensive aspects of your product, no matter the upfront cost. Hire a good community manager and set them to work.

23. Offer a up-to-date, clean, compelling application design. Attractive applications inherently attract new customers to try them and is a pre-requisite to good usability and user experience. Visual and navigational unattractiveness and complexity is also the enemy of product adoption. Finally, using the latest designs and modes provides visual cues that conveys that the product is timely and informed. A good place to start to make sure you're using the latest user experience ideas and trends is Smashing Magazine's 2009 Web Design survey.

24. Load-time and responsiveness matter, measure and optimize for them on a regular basis. This is not a glamorous aspect of Web applications but it's a fundamental that is impossible to ignore. Every second longer a key operation like main page load or a major feature interaction takes, the more likely a customer is to consider finding a faster product. On the Web, time is literally money and building high speed user experiences is essential. Rich Internet Application technologies such as Ajax and Flash, albeit used wisely, can help make an application seem as fast as the most responsive desktop application. Using content distribution networks and regional hosting centers.

25. User experience should follow a "complexity gradient." Novice users will require a simple interface but will want an application's capabilities to become more sophisticated over time as they become more skilled in using it. Offering more advanced features that are available when a user is ready but are hidden until they are allows a product to grow with the user and keeps them engaged instead of looking for a more advanced alternative.

26. Monetize every page view. There is no excuse for not making sure every page is driving bottom-line results for your online business. Some people will disagree with this recommendation and advertising can often seem overly commercial early in a product's life. However, though a Web application should never look like a billboard, simple approaches like one line sponsorships or even public service messages are good ideas to maximize the business value of the product and there are other innovation approaches as well.

27. Users' data belongs to them, not you. This is a very hard strategy for some to accept and you might be able to get away with bending this rule for a while, that is, until some of your users want to move their data elsewhere. Data can be a short-term lock-in strategy, but long-term user loyalty comes from treating them fairly and avoiding a 'Roach Motel' approach to user data ("they can check-in their data, but they can't check out.") Using your application should be a reversible process and users should have control of their data. See DataPortability.org for examples of how to get started with this.

28. Go to the user, don't only make them come to you. The aforementioned APIs and widgets help with this but are not sufficient. The drive strong user adoption, you have to be everywhere else on the Web that you can be. This can mean everything from the usual advertising, PR, and press outreach but it also means creating Facebook applications, OpenSocial gadgets, and enabling use from mashups. These methods can often be more powerful than all the traditional ways combined.

29. SEO is as important as ever, so design for it. One of the most important stream of new users will be people coming in from search engines looking for exactly what you have. This stream is free and quite large if you are ensuring your data is URL addressable and can be found via search engine Web crawlers. Your information architecture should be deeply SEO-friendly and highly granular.

30. Know thy popular Web standards and use them. From a consumer or creator standpoint, the data you will exchange with everyone else will be in some format or another. And the usefulness of that data or protocol will be in inverse proportion to how well-known and accepted the standard is. This generally means using CSS, Javascript, XHTML, HTTP, ATOM, RSS, XML, JSON, and so on. Following open standards enables the maximum amount of choice, flexibility, time-to-market, access to talent pools, and many other benefits over time to both you and your customers.

31. Understand and apply Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA). The Web has a certain way that it works best and understanding how HTTP works at a deep level is vital for getting the most out of the unique power that the Internet has to offer. But HTTP is just the beginning of this way of thinking about the Web and how to use its intrinsic power to be successful with with it. This includes knowing why and how link structure, network effects, SEO, API ecosystems, mashups, and other aspects of the Web are key to making your application flourish. It's important to note that your internal application architecture is likely not fundamentally Web-oriented itself (because most software development platforms are not Web-oriented) and you'll have to be diligent in enabling a WOA model in your Web-facing product design. The bottom line: Non-Web-oriented products tend not to fare very well by failing to take advantage of the very things that have made the Web itself so successful.

32. Online products that build upon enterprise systems should use open SOA principles. Large companies building their first 2.0 products will often use existing IT systems and infrastructure that already have the data and functionality they need. Although they will often decouple and cache them for scalability and performance, the connectedness itself is best done using the principles of SOA. That doesn't necessarily mean traditional SOA products and standards, although it could, often using more Web-oriented methods works better. What does this really mean? Stay away from proprietary integration methods and use the most open models you can find, understanding that the back-end of most online products will be consumed by more than just your front-end (see API discussion above for a fuller exploration).

33. Strategically use feeds and syndication to enable deep content distribution. This is another way to use Jakob's Law to increase unintended uses and consumption of an application from other sites and ecosystems. Feeds enable many beneficial use cases such as near real-time perception of fresh data in your application from across the Web in feed readers, syndication sites, aggregators, and elsewhere. Like many other techniques here, knee-jerk use of feeds won't drive much additional usage and adoption, but carefully designing feeds to achieve objectives like driving new customers back to the application directly from the feed can make a big difference. Failing to offer useful feeds is one of the easiest ways to miss out on business opportunities while giving your competitors an edge.

34. Build on the shoulders of giants; don't recreate what you can source from elsewhere. Today's Internet application usually require too much functionality to be cost-effectively built by a single effort. Typically, an application will actually source dozens of components and external functionality from 3rd parties. This could be off-the-shelf libraries or it could be the live use of another site's API, the latter which has become one of the most interesting new business models in the Web 2.0 era. The general rule of thumb: Unless it's a strategic capability of your application, try hard to source it from elsewhere before you build it; 3rd parties sources are already more hardened, robust, less expensive, and lower defect than any initial code could that you could produce. Get used to doing a rapid build vs. buy evaluation for each major component of your application.

35. Register the user as soon as possible. One of the most valuable aspects of your onine product will be the registered user base. Make sure you application gives them a good reason to register and that the process is as painless as possible. Each additional step or input field will increase abandonment of the process and you can always ask for more information later. Consider making OpenID the default login, with your local user database a 2nd tier, to make the process even easier and more comfortable for the user.

36. Explicitly enable your users to co-develop the product. I call this concept Product Development 2.0 and it's one of the most potent ways to create a market-leading product by engaging the full capabilities of the network. The richest source of creative input you will have is your audience of passionate, engaged users. This can be enabled via simple feedback forms, harvested from surveys and online community forums, via services such as GetSatisfaction, or as the ingredients to mashups and user generated software. As you'll see below, you can even open the code base or provide a plug-in approach/open APIs to allow motivated users and 3rd parties to contribute working functionality. Whichever of these you do, you'll find that the innovation and direction to be key to making your product the richest and most robust it can be. A significant percentage of the top online products in the world take advantage of this key 2.0 technique.

37. Provide the legal and collaborative foundations for others to build on your data and platform. A good place to start is to license as much of your product as you can via Creative Commons or another licensing model that is less restrictive and more open than copyright or patents. Unfortunately, this is something for which 20th century business models around law, legal precedent, and traditional product design are ill-equipped to support and you'll have to look at what other market leaders are doing with IP licensing that is working. Giving others explicit permission up-front to repurpose and reuse your data and functionality in theirs can be essential to drive market share and success. Another good method is to let your users license their data as well and Flickr is famous for doing this. It's important to understand that this is now the Some Right Reserved era, not the All Rights Reserved era. So openly license what your have for others to use; the general rule of thumb is that the more you give away, the more you'll get back, as long as you have a means of exercising control. This is why open APIs have become as popular as they have, since they are essentially "IP-as-a-service" and poorly behaving partner/licensees can be dealt with quickly and easily.

38. Design your product to build a strong network effect. The concept of the network effect is something I've covered here extensively before and it's one of the most important items in this list. At their most basic, Web 2.0 applications are successful because they explicitly leverage network effects successfully. This is the underlying reason why most of the leading Internet companies got so big, so fast. Measuring network effects and driving them remains one of the most poorly understood yet critical aspects of competing successfully online. The short version: It's extremely hard to fight an established network effect (particularly because research has shown them to be highly exponential). Instead, find a class of data or a blue ocean market segment for your product and its data to serve.

39. Know your Web 2.0 design patterns and business models. The fundamental principles of Web 2.0 were all identifid and collected together for a good reason. Each principle is something that must be considered carefully in the design of your product given how they can magnify your network effect. Your development team must understand them and know why they're important, especially what outcomes they will drive in your product and business. It's the same with Enterprise 2.0 products: There is another, related set of design principles (which I've summarized as FLATNESSES) that makes them successful as well. And as with everything on this list, you don't apply 2.0 principles reflexively; they need to be intelligently used for good reason.

40. Integrate a coherent social experience into your product. Social systems tend to have a much more pronounced network effect (Reed's Law) than non-social systems. Though no site should be social without a good reason, it turns out that most applications will benefit from having a social experience. What does this mean in practice? In general, social applications let users perceive what other users are doing and actively encourage them to interact, work together, and drive participation through social encouragement and competition. There is a lot of art to the design of the social architecture of an online product, but there is also an increasing amount of science. Again, you can look at what successful sites are doing with their social interaction but good places to start are with user profiles, friends lists, activity streams, status messages, social media such as blogs and microsharing, and it goes up from there. Understand how Facebook Connect and other open social network efforts such as OpenSocial can help you expand your social experience.

41. Understand your business model and use it to drive your product design. Too many Web 2.0 applications hope that they will create large amounts of traffic and will then find someone interested in acquiring them. Alternatively, some products charge too much up front and prevent themselves from reaching critical mass. While over-thinking your exit strategy or trying to determine your ultimate business model before you do anything isn't good either, too many startups don't sit down and do the rigorous thinking around how to make their business a successful one in the nearer term. Take a look at Andrew Chen's How To Create a Profitable Freemium Startup for a good example of the framework on how to do some of the business model planning. Taking into account the current economic downturn and making sure you're addressing how you offering can help people and businesses in the current business climate will also help right now.

42. Embrace emergent development methods. While a great many of the Web's best products had a strong product designer with a clear vision that truly understood his or her industry, the other half of the equation that often gets short shrift is the quality of emergent design through open development. This captures the innate crowdsourcing aspects of ecosystem-based products, specifically those that have well-defined points of connectedness with external development inputs and 3rd party additions. Any Web application has some emergent development if it takes development inputs or extensibility with via 3rd party plug-ins, widgets, open APIs, open source contributions, and so on. The development (and a good bit of the design) of the product then "emerges" as a function of multiple inputs. Though there is still some top-down control, in essence, the product becomes more than the sum total of its raw inputs. Products like Drupal and Facebook are good examples of this, with thousands of plug-ins or 3rd party apps that have been added to them by other developers.

43. It's all about usability, usability, and usability. I've mentioned usability before in this list but I want to make it a first class citizen. Nothing will be a more imposing barrier to adoption that people not understanding how your product works. Almost nothing on this list will work until the usability of your application is a given. And hands down the most common mistake I see are Web developers creating user experiences in isolation. If you're not funded to have a usability lab (and you probably should be, at some level), then you need to grab every friend and family member you have to watch how they use your application for the first time. Do this again for every release that makes user experience changes. You will change a surprising number of assumptions and hear feedback that you desperately need to hear before you invest any more in a new user experience approach. This now true even if you're developing enterprise applications for the Web.

44. Security isn't an afterthought. It's a sad fact that far too much of a successful startup's time will be spent on security issues. Once you are popular, you will be the target of every so-called script kiddie with a grudge or with the desire to get at your customer data, etc. Software vulnerability are numerous and the surface area of modern Web apps large. You not only have your own user experience but also your API, widgets, semantic Web connections, social networking applications, and other points of attack. Put aside time and budget for regular vulnerability assessments. You can't afford a public data spill or exploit due to a security hole that will compromise your user's data, or you may well find yourself with a lot of departing customers.Web 2.0 applications also need unique types of security systems, from rate limiters to prevent valuable user-generated data from being systematically scraped from the site (this is vital to "maintaining control of unique and hard-to-re-create datasets") to monitoring software that will screen for objectionable or copyrighted contributions.

45. Stress test regularly and before releases. It's a well known saying in the scalability business that your next bottleneck is hiding just behind your last high water mark. Before your launch, data volumes and loads that work fine in the lab should be tested to expected production volumes before launch. The Web 2.0 industry is rife with examples of companies that went down the first time they got a good traffic spike. That's the very worst time to fail, since it's your best chance of getting a strong initial network effect and may forever reduce your ultimate success. Know your volume limits and ceilings with each release and prepare for the worst.

46. Backup and disaster recovery, know your plan. This is another unglamorous but essential aspect for any online product. How often are backups being made of all your data? Are the backups tested? Are they kept offsite? If you don't know the answers, the chances that you'll survive a major event is not high.

47. Good Web products understand that there is more than the Web. Do you have a desktop widget for Vista or the Mac? Might you benefit from offering an Adobe AIR client version of your application? How about integration and representation in vitual worlds and games? How about linkages to RFID or GPS sensors? Startups thinking outside the box might even create their own hardware device if it makes sense (see Chumby and the iPhone/iPod for examples). If one thing that is certain is that the next generation of successful Web startups will only partially resemble what we see today. Successful new online products will take advantage of "software above the level of a single device" and deliver compelling combinations of elements into entirely new products that are as useful and innovative as they are unexpected. A great Web 2.0 product often has a traditional Web application as only part of its overall design, see the Doritos Crash the Superbowl campaign for just one small example of this.

48. Look for emerging areas on the edge of the Web. These are the spaces that have plenty of room for new players and new ideas, where network effects aren't overly established and marketshare is for the taking. What spaces are these? The Semantic Web seems to be coming back with all new approaches (I continue to be amazed at how much appears about this topic on http://delicious.com/popular/web3.0 these days.) Open platform virtual worlds such as Second Life were hot a few years ago and may be again. Mobile Web applications are extremely hot today but slated to get over crowded this year as everyone plans a mobile application for phone platforms. What is coming after this? That is less clear but those that are watching closely will benefit the most.

49. Plan to evolve over time, for a long time. The Web never sits still. Users change, competitors improve, what's possible continues to expand as new capabilities emerge in the software and hardware landscape. In the Perpetual Beta era, products are never really done. Never forget that, continue to push yourself, or be relegated to a niche in history.

50. Continually improve yourself and your Web 2.0 strategies. While process improvement is one of those lip-service topics that most people will at least admit to aspire to, few have the time and resources to carry it out on a regular basis. But without that introspection on our previous experience we wouldn't have many of the "aha" moments that drove forward our industry at various points in term. Without explicit attempts at improvement, we might not have developed the ideas that became object-oriented languages, search engine marketing, Web 2.0, or even the Internet itself. This list itself is about that very process and encapsulates a lot of what we've learned in the last 4 years. Consequently, if you're not sitting down and making your own list from your own experiences, you're much more likely to repeat past history, never mind raising the bar. Like I'm often fond of saving; civilization progresses when we make something that was formerly hard to do and make it easy to do. Take the time, capture your lessons learned, and improve your strategies.

What else is missing here? Please contribute your own 2.0 strategies in comments below:

You can also get help with these strategies from a Web 2.0 assessment, get a deeper perspective on these ideas at Web 2.0 University, or attend our upcoming Economics 2.0 workshop at Web 2.0 Expo SF on March 31st, 2009.

How to Survive and Thrive in Business Today with Web 2.0 - Part 1

Dion Hinchcliffe — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 00:19:00 GMT

Two of the big themes clearly evident at this week's Web 2.0 Summit is 1) how to effect change successfully today and 2) how to deliver genuine, meaningful value in today's marketplace. The current economic climate combined with this week's seminal change in the current political administration has begun positioning organizations to think about how to not only survive the business environment and apparent recession today, but how to fundamentally transform what they're doing for the better.

The era of get rich quick Internet startups has begun to give way to a quiet new pragmatism; rethinking what we're doing in the world of business today -- both online and traditional -- to achieve qualitatively different and better outcomes, especially ones that aren't exclusively financial. There are actually many opportunities, if we only know how to look for them, as Mary Meeker brilliantly explained here in San Francisco yesterday (video ).

Interest in achieving important secondary outcomes has become vital too. Reestablishing the trust we've lost recently in government and large institutions is certainly part of that, especially as the boundary and control of these are so much less certain in the 2.0 era. So is resolving many increasingly pressing issues around the resources we use to conduct business, civic affairs, and our personal lives. Our sources of human capital, who makes decisions for our organizations, where the best ideas are sourced, where our energy inputs will come from, and the models we use to build and service our customers/partners has increasingly changed. And it's being changed by everything from open source software to peer production systems, which have remade entire industries (software and media being some of the most affected) with 2.0 ideas heading towards just about everything, even highly regulated industries.

However, this year's collapse of many previously well-regarded (depending on your viewpoint) institutions has created a massive discontinuity in ongoing evolution of existing business models. One can make the argument that this disruption is the end state conclusion of 20th century business models, which had become less and less viable in the 2.0 era, where openness, transparency, and participation are the hallmarks. Combined with the business model astronautics that many traditional businesses engaged in along with the marketplace delivering a dramatic and painful wakeup call -- specifically that recent directions in the traditional business world often just don't work well anymore -- and we have a mandate to dramatically transform what we do today.

These days many businesses large and small are actively planning how to make it through the current economic situation. Whether the current downtown lasts 4 months or 4 years, however, a new generation of business seems to be emerging. This had started to be clear a few years ago with the advent of all the things we like to call Web 2.0. But with the sudden and seismic changes in the business environment this year, we've now seen how Web 2.0 has become one of the most promising models for how we will design and build our products and services and self-organization our institutions drive our businesses into the future.

**Exploring How To Survive and Thrive With Web 2.0**

Over the next few weeks I'll be posting a series of articles that deeply explore a strategy for using the power of Web 2.0 ideas to move businesses into the 21st century. These strategies will drive forward any organization to not only survive present economic circumstances but drive growth and innovation while transforming safely to what increasingly appears to be a generational change in the business landscape. In other words, what you've been doing in the past will often no longer apply in the future. The assumptions that we've learned in a previous generation of IT and business education and occupations are frequently mattering less and less to how we accomplish our work and live our lives.

Everything that we do today is now significantly impacted by 2.0 ideas. This applies to product development, marketing, customer service, operations, line of business, finance, communications, human resources, and just about everything in most organizations. How then do we start understanding the axes of opportunity and being applying to our organizations? My recent post on what CIOs and CTOs need to know about how to transform their organizations to Web 2.0 is a good start but it doesn't go to the heart of the value proposition that become increasingly clear.

The scope of this subject is too broad to cover in a single post, though you can get a clear sense of the overall subject matter in the visual in the figure above. Consequently, I'll begin exploring each quadrant of this visual over the next few weeks, looking at how to use 2.0 to dramatically create growth, transform the customer relationship to drive revenue, drive operational costs down, improve productivity, safely restructure our business models, effect change, and leverage/harnessing innovation. By strategically applying everything from Enterprise 2.0 and Product Development 2.0 to lightweight SOA (aka Web-Oriented Architecture) and peer production -- to call out just a few of the relevant 2.0 concepts, organizations can reduce risk, create value, and map out potent avenues that lead towards a compelling set of new opportunities.

Survive and Thrive Uncon at Web 2.0 Summit in SF, Friday @ 1:15PM: I'll be trying to use Twitter to organize a short, ad-hoc unconference session around these strategies tomorrow and I do hope you'll come. Bring your own ideas and strategies on how to use the network to remake our businesses and I'll roll it into this work. Anyone is welcome (even those not at the conference) and I will hold during lunch tomorrow at 1:15PM PST. Location and details to follow.

For further background, also be sure to read Umair Haque's insightful Why Traditional Recession Tactics Are Doomed To Fail This Time from the Harvard Business School as well as my High Order Bit Keynote at Web 2.0 Expo Europe last month.

Ten Aspects of Web 2.0 Strategy That Every CTO and CIO Should Know

Dion Hinchcliffe — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 17:55:00 GMT

Over the last year I've worked with organizations around the world that are attempting to grapple with Web 2.0 and the growing external marketplace pressure being exerted for the change and transformation of their businesses. Along the way, I've been fortunate enough to be able to identify and assemble a working list of some consistent recurring issues and themes around Web 2.0 strategy. I've provided them below at a high level. Your comments and additions are very welcome as we try to frame up a consistent picture of what's happening in the marketplace.

It used to be a little surprising how long it's taken for Web 2.0 to begin to have serious impact on or even high-level interest in the business world. However, the ideas have had staying power and have also largely been validated; there are now fundamentally different and very powerful new models for engaging with customers, designing our products, and applying technology in general to our business that are proven and have growing bodies of knowledge. The Web has become the single most important driving force in many fields of endeavor as well as the leading source of both innovation and potent new modes for communicating, collaborating, socializing, and working together. It's taken a few years but businesses are now feeling the change in the air.

However, as I've said a number of times in my various discussions of Web 2.0, the power of the network has deep roots in some profound shifts in society and culture, particularly the singular move from push-based systems (the 1.0 era going way, way back until right around now) to pull-based systems (the 2.0 era from roughly a few years into this century and going forward). That this shift is well under way is clear if you look at the sudden explosion of the blogosphere, social networking, social media, open source software, online communities, and peer production in virtually all things. The good news (or bad news, depending on how you look at it) is that despite the remaking of more than a few industries already -- including media, software, advertising -- this shift is only just beginning.

This all raises the question of how to make the transition from 1.0 to 2.0 safely and non-disruptively with your business largely intact, perhaps even with a superior competitive position. That this transition can actually be accomplished by most businesses is still far from clear though some early transitions have met with varying degrees of success. This list represents some of what we've learned so far about 2.0 transformation but it's something that strikes at the very heart of most businesses today: The rules for success are not-so-gradually changing and the marketplace is driving it in an often-subversive grassroots, bottom-up way. The question now is no longer about "if" but increasingly about thriving long-term, period: What are you willing to do to adapt to a new business world?

This list is aimed primarily at CTOs and CIOs since they are mostly likely to be located at the convergence of traditional business thinking and the wave of 2.0 change coming in off the network. However these ideas apply to anyone looking at how to embrace 2.0 transformation in their organization and take advantage of it. This is one of the most exciting eras to be in businesses since so many directions are in flux and the outcomes, players, and market leaders of the near future are far from certain. Those who can see the new opportunities clearly through the lens of 2.0 transformation not only have a fighting chance, but are able to seize them with once-in-a-generation ease.

Note: I've dropped the "Web" in Web 2.0 for this discussion because one of the big lessons is that many traditional business thinkers turn off when they hear the word, even though Web 2.0 design patterns and business models have truly profound implications across any business today. Consequently, hat the Web is driving most of these changes is being considered incidental for this discussion (though it's absolutely the opposite when actually executing on these new models.) Instead, this is targeted a discussion about the transformative models themselves (such as who creates the products and where, how they are used, who supports them, how are they remixed, syndicated, franchised, licensed, IP protected, etc) in a strategic businesses sense. At the core of this discussion is how 1.0 business models of the 20th century are very much being eroded, transformed, and frequently dethroned by the immense motive forces that lie in the pervasive, open networked systems we have today, which are taking us deeply into a very new place: the 2.0 era.

Ten Key Aspects of Web 2.0 Strategy

It's not about technology, it's about the changes it enables. While technology is a close second (and ultimately makes 2.0 business models possible), the real discussion is about the disruptive new opportunities it creates. Instead the discussion should be focused more around strategies such as harnessing millions of customers over the network to co-create products through peer production, engaging in mass customer self-service, customer communities, and open supply chains to thousands of ad hoc partners with open APIs. These are just some of the examples of using the network to create far richer and more profound results than could be created in the 1.0 era. Don't get caught up in the technology of 2.0 at first other than to understand the business possibilities it affords. Avoid technology-first discussions like the plague. Premature monetization discussions around 2.0 are also to be avoided, they tend to have a negative impact on process if done too early.
The implications of 2.0 stands many traditional views on their head and so change takes more time than usual. In the 2.0 world customers and partners have a much closer, more sustained relationship because of social interaction and tightly integrated online supply chains, to name just two reasons. The shift of control from institutions to communities of users takes a lot of getting used to. Just understanding how and why intellectual property is better covered by Creative Commons instead of copyright will take the legal department years (if not decades). Each part of the organization will have its miniature 2.0 revolution. These take time to happen and sort themselves out. This means getting these new ideas into people's heads is one of the first steps...
Get the ideas, concepts, and vocabulary out into the organization and circulating. If you're trying to affect 2.0 change in an organization, there's no better solution that exposing people to it. Demographics can be a problem in this situation depending on the industry. Younger workers tend to live and breath 2.0 while older workers may be aware of it but don't think it applies to them. I use point education where change needs to happen either first or quickly and then internal communities that bring the discussion of change, innovation, and transformation to the entire organization. Either way, learning and education around 2.0 are a vital trigger to begin change and should be started early and non-disruptively.
Existing management methods and conventional wisdom are a hard barrier to 2.0 strategy and transformation. You don't have to get far into discussions about the Perpetual Beta or Product Development 2.0 before existing management methods seem outdated, inflexible, and ineffective. This is one of the more difficult aspects of adopting 2.0 models and the implications is that we'll have to do a lot of rethinking how we manage businesses driven by 2.0 models, where the boundaries of organizations are less clear, the ownership is much more community-based, and the outcomes are far more diverse and spread out, making them less trackable, controllable, and directed. Overhauling management practices and techniques will be a core activity in a 2.0 transformation and will be hard to achieve quickly enough due to the Innovator's Dilemma.
Avoiding external disruption is hard but managing self-imposed risk caused by 2.0 is easier. The great fear than many businesses have is facing a fast-growth competitor that takes these ideas and either wrests away market share rapidly and aggressively or cuts them off at the pass with entirely new products. YouTube did this to the broadcast and cable industry, which responded with Hulu. Apple did this with iTunes to the recording industry and the blogosphere did the same to the newspaper industry. Other industries are next likely including the financial services industry, real estate, and others. Internally, however, risk management is still a challenge but is much more manageable. The big implication for this is that starting internally first with things like Enterprise 2.0 initiatives and prediction markets to learn the ropes on how to deal with unexpected outcomes and results can help organizations climb the maturity curve.
Incubators and pilots projects can help create initial environments for success with 2.0 efforts. Too much contact with the traditional support environment of an existing, primarily 1.0 organization makes it hard for 2.0 efforts to succeed; everything gets done in the traditional way instead of the new ways that are required. The traditional tools, processes, and skills just aren't there or are just too slow and burdened with unnecessary overhead. Creating dedicated incubators that are designed to use the strengths of the organization while being isolated from its weaknesses can help. Incubators are at risk of becoming too isolated however, and won't inform or change the greater organization unless care is taken to roll the lessons and capability back in.
Irreversible decisions around 2.0 around topics such as brand, reputation, and corporate strategy can be delayed quite a while, and sometime forever. Most organizations get paralysis around change and transformation because of concerns around decisions that can't be reversed. Concern over damaging the company's brand is one of the top issues I run into and it's a valid concern. The good news is that many organizations are discovering they can safely leverage the advantages of their organization (such as their extensive customer base to drive initial growth of 2.0 engagement and adoption of new products and services) without dragging their brand into it whatsoever. New 2.0 products from major companies are now often released under new brands entirely. This enables serious experimentation with 2.0 while taking little risk to the organization.
The technology competence organizations have today are inadequate for moving to 2.0. This is key if you're a CTO or CIO today; your organization is almost certainly not ready to handle the development, management, scalability, identity, governance, and openness issues around 2.0. If you're not sure, just ask your IT staff. Examples include cloud computing, open APIs, mashups, rich user experiences, Web-Oriented-Architecture, community platforms, Enterprise 2.0, 2.0-era computing stacks like Rails and Django, are all disciplines that are considerable in their own right, of rapidly growing importance to organizations in the 2.0 era. These are all likely to be things your staff needs to come up the learning curve on in significant ways and with the rate of change on the network what it is presently, falling behind is too easy to do. Note: The existing technology landscape of most organizations will have to change as well which is where Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA) is getting quite a bit of attention today. And the Web products themselves have moved far beyond the model of the Web page and most enterprises are very far behind.
The business side requires 2.0 competence as well. This includes how to design, build, launch, market, support, and maintain 2.0 products and services as well as the ways that workers should use the tools and concepts to work together. I recently suggested that learning how to be effective in working within and directing communities of workers/users/partners to accomplish large-scale outcomes will be a vital skill in the very near future. All of this requires both a new perspective as well as a hard-headed effort at skill building and a re-orientation of existing work habits and processes.
Start small, think big. We have discovered that the leverage the network can give us is almost unlimited. It's ability to scale ideas, products, and communities of users as fast as they are able to is one of the aspects that makes it so attractive to business. 2.0 products tends to be very simple at heart, and though there is certainly challenges and complications growing, small ideas can become big very, very quickly. Getting to the right solutions, not-overinvesting (which leads to complication and heavyweight management and processes) and letting customers and partners take the seeds of great ideas and run with them is what makes sudden success turn into a large-scale success. On the Web, starting small, and thinking big can take you a long, long way. Read more about network effects driven by architectures of participation .

Please share your ideas around what else is essential in a Web 2.0 strategy below.

Building Modern Web Apps? Better Have A Deep Competency in Web 2.0, Open APIs, Widgets, Social Apps, and Much More

Dion Hinchcliffe — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 13:21:00 GMT

The Web has an interesting property that those building Web applications and online businesses usually encounter soon after they first launch: It has its own unique and unforgiving rules for success and failure. Appreciating them requires a certain level of understanding of the intrinsic nature of the Web and how it works. Actually leveraging those rules requires an even deeper and more profound understanding of the Web. The challenge these days? The Web competency bar is climbing fast.

To drive the right decisions in what they do product designers, marketing teams, software architects, developers, strategy officers, and other key roles in today's generation of online businesses need to have a solid handle on an extensive array of Web topics. This ranges from appreciating why plain old HTTP is so good at underpinning the Web to more sophisticated topics like modern application architecture, the latest in online user experiences, next generation computing models (grid/cloud/utility/SaaS/PaaS), cost-effective scalability, user identity, network effects, Jakob's Law, analytics, operations, user community, as well as the many compelling new distribution models that are nearly mandatory in the first release of most products.

This extensive set of competencies is what's required nowadays to deliver a credible online product to a receptive user base and it has dramatic implications for both uptake and overall cost/time-to-market. Worse, this body of knowledge has become extensive enough that many Web startups frequently fall far short of what they need to know in order to be successful with these far flung practice areas.

Does this complex body of knowledge mean the era of the two-to-five person Web startup is coming to a close? Not at all, at least not yet. The productivity level of the latest tools and techniques remains almost astonishing though the level of knowledge required of these teams is creeping up and up. And as we'll see, new models for product distribution are pushing the capability envelope of the typical Internet startup team to the point we may very well see the day soon that they won't have all the skills necessary to deliver a fully-scoped modern Web application. It is also one reason why fewer and fewer Web startups have the goods to be all around hits out of the gate.

Certainly, varying depths in subject matter are required depending one's exact role in a Web business, but Web-oriented products are fundamentally shaped the vagaries of the network itself. Tim O'Reilly himself still has the best quote on the subject: "Winners and losers will be designated by who figures out how to use the network." And as we'll see, the Web is driving the evolution of a major new generation of online distribution models.

Why Adopting New Distribution Models Is Crucial

As an example of this, I've been tracking some of the latest discussions around the hot topic du jour in the Web world: Social networking applications. Specifically, it's been interesting to watch the surprisingly low level of industry attention around the titanic competition brewing between social networking application formats from Web giants Facebook and Google. Why is this? Some might say it's because these applications still have largely unproven business models. Others, like Nick O'Neill at the Social Times recently observed (rightly in my opinion) that the struggle may have to do with a deficit in understanding why these new types of Web applications are so important. Nick notes that these widget and social networking style models for packaging and distributing Web apps often "have more eyeballs looking at their products than television channels have" and the challenge is that too many people just "don’t know what any of this means", despite the major players divvying up the online pie for themselves. With the size of these next generation distribution audiences, ignorance has an extremely painful price: failure to produce results and growth, poor engagement with the marketplace, and loss of market share.

An excellent summary of the truly massive, but largely underappreciated scale of these new Web application models was last week's TechCrunch piece on the progress of Google's OpenSocial, an increasingly successful model for creating portable social networking applications that will run on any OpenSocial-compliant site. Erick Schonfeld reported that OpenSocial now has a total reach of an astonishing 350 million users and it will soon be 500 million. There are over 4,500 OpenSocial apps today, a healthy number for the application format but a small drop in the bucket compared to the number of Web sites in the world. But the key is that these applications are integrated much deeper into the social fabric of an engaged audience, interjecting themselves into the daily personal and work habits of the "captive" users of social sites and even have access to the personal habits and data of users of these sites. Facebook's story is impressive as well with over 37,000 applications that have been installed over 700 million times.

And social networking applications are just one of many news ways that applications have to be packaged and distributed, yet far too many organizations persist in a very 1990s view of Web experiences, namely that Web sites themselves are the center of online product design. Many even think that some of these other new distribution models are interesting but not part of their core online product. Unfortunately, that's very much a parochial view in the present era. Federated applications, atomized content and functionality, 3rd party product ecosystems through open APIs, and much more are required to establish a strong and resilient network effect which fends off competitors that are themselves bringing these potent new competencies to bear.

In fact, one of the things we emphasize over and over again in our conference workshops and in Web 2.0 University is that having a Web site is usually the least interesting things about new products. Worse, it makes the customer have to find you amongst tens of millions of other sites. Instead, these new models tend to focus on going to the customer, instead of making them come to you which is a much harder proposition. This can instantly give you the ability to reach millions of potential people with dramatically lower effort and cost, as long as you have something interesting to offer.

Unfortunately, the number of capable practitioners of these new distribution models remains relatively small compared to the large body of experts in traditional Web product development. Demand is also low for these new skills as most organizations have been painfully slow to appreciate how much online product development has changed. A quick search of the job aggregator SimplyHired tells the tale: Nearly a thousand Web designer positions are available while only 36 OpenSocial and 40 open API positions are open, for example. This despite the the latter skills being able to project a product across the Web into hundreds of social sites or create an API that allows the product to be incorporated into countless other products for far less cost per customer than traditional methods.

The lesson here is that these new models still have a lot of fertile, unclaimed territory and many otherwise fierce competitors have not yet become fully aware of these new opportunities. Get your piece of the pie while there's still time.

I also find that the Web development industry has been slow to change, particularly outside the valley, and there is depressingly scarce information on how to deliver well on things like widgets, open APIs, social networking applications, and even syndication. To help with this, I've put together a short primer and some good references for those that want to get started.

Because the good news is that there remains tremendous opportunity for growth and success -- for both startups and traditional businesses -- if they will actively begin incorporating these new product delivery models into their own online capabilities.

Overview of Online Product Delivery Models

Web sites. This the classic model for Web presence. During the early Web, creating a Web site was just about the only option for engaging with those online (e-mail being the other.) Most early Web sites were used for publishing and not for user participation or peer production. These days, Web sites are still important, though by no means mandatory, and have their content syndicated via RSS and ATOM (pushing the content to where it's wanted), provide an access point to obtain widgets, and maintain user identity, and create communities of users. Upshot: They've evolved a lot but Web sites are only part of an extensive set of capabilities that must be brought to bear in the Web 2.0 era.
Syndication. It took ten years for the Web community to figure out a workable syndication model. Now RSS and ATOM are now the expected models used to distribute content off a single site and across the Web. Countless aggregation services now exist that make a site's information embedded in their services as well as a way to offer users a method for pulling information from a site and experienced in a means of their choosing, from Google Reader and Newsgator to the innovative Yahoo! Pipes. Most sites still heavily underutilize syndication even for notifications and pushing out frequently changed information to draw attention to it much less the strategic ecosystem and integration opportunities it affords.
Web 2.0 applications. You might argue that Web 2.0 itself is not a product distribution model but a set of design patterns and business models and that would be a true statement. However, in this context we're referring to the fact that Web 2.0 apps package up the 3rd major type of networked value: user participation. Before then, Web sites and syndication primarily had only centrally produced content or functionality that they could expose over the network and offer to the marketplace. In other words, user participation its purest form -- sometimes known as peer production -- ultimately results in products like Mechanical Turk and Predictify that provide direct networked access to user participation, but there are many fine gradations to this. The bottom line, Web 2.0 applications plug the user into the network like never before and are a critical rung in the distribution ladder since it offers access to the largest set of content and information by harnessing collective intelligence.
Open APIs and Web services. This is one of the most important long-term decisions most online businesses can make. Offering an open API lets anyone take the online components of a business, from its data and functional capabilities to the users themselves, and makes them open and accessible over the Web to be incorporated into other products and services, sometimes in the form of mashups and sometimes in the form of entire online products. Amazon, one of the first Web companies in existence and is hence far downrange in terms of the experience curve, has been using this distribution model with notable success recently. So have hundreds of others. The real challenge has been how foreign this model is to the original Web model and thus to the various management and development competencies in most organizations. It's much more an a way to OEM a product and leverage the customers and investments of hundreds of other partners. However, overall, it affords the potential for much larger business outcomes than could ever be created with point Web presence. It's now considered a significant oversight not to have an open API available for the typical online product.
Web widgets. Selecting parts of a Web site and it's data and packaging it up to make it run inside a portable, user distributable widget has been growing more and more popular over the last few years. For example, WidgetBox currently distributes 74,000 different kinds of Web widgets from its partners to over 1.2 million other sites. Widgets lets users distribute a Web site to other places on the Web at no extra cost and it also creates an ecosystem effect, where other Web sites users become the users of the new site. The YouTube badge is a notoriously well-known example of this that also helped drive the extraordinarily fast growth of the site. Like APIs, widgets are now considered a mandatory must-have for new and existing online products. But unlike APIs where it's up to the API users, figuring out users want out of your site's widgets is still an art form.
Social networking applications. Sometimes viewed as an extension of the Web widget model, social networking applications are applications designed to run inside of popular social networking environments and usually have capabilities that tap into and make use of the social graph information resident in a user's social network account. This is an amazingly fast moving field as you can see from a recent post on the latest happenings on the OpenSocial blog, to the extent it's hard even for well-funded companies to keep up. However, despite skepticism that large businesses can be built exclusively through a social networking application, it's become ever more essential for a site to make its capabilities accessible usable in these environments. Not only will users help distribute online products in these formats to their contacts but it also increases the overall usage of the your application including participation and its consequently growth of a site's network effect. While not yet considered mandatory for online products, the ease with which these social network applications can be created and the large numbers of users they make available makes it a smart distribution option for most Web businesses. Like widgets, however, figuring out what users will find engaging in a social networking application featuring your online product takes some research and experimentation. However, the results can be very rewarding and some social networking applications have millions of daily users. See the Plaxo Pulse story on Mashable for the details of how OpenSocial drove a 5x improvement in traffic in only 3 weeks.
Semantic Web and Web 3.0. The Semantic Web, one of the original visions for the World Wide Web, has taken a while to arrive but it's beginning to look like it may hit critical mass in the next 12-24 months. Combined with Web 3.0, which takes the architectures of participation at the core of Web 2.0 and drives it through a lens of Semantic Web capabilities. The benefits can be profound and can greatly increase the value and leverage of information on the Web. While this is very much not prime time yet, unlike #1-#6 above, it likely will be and smart organizations can get ahead of the learning curve and get an early market lead using these techniques. For now, however, I recommend that most organizations focus on executing well on the first six items before tackling this and waiting for the technologies to finish emerging and maturing.

The list above should provide good guidance for starting move into the potent new models for distribution on the Web. I'm seeing, however, that because of the major shifts in strategy and product design emphasis these techniques demand, most organizations take an inordinately long amount of time to become effective with them. The lesson here: Start small now and build core competency. Small investments now can pay off later in terms of valuable experience made from early experiments and pilots. When done right,
these new distribution models can become the dominant channels that the world uses to interact with your business, like they already have with Amazon and Twitter.

I'll be talking about these and other strategic online product design topics in my upcoming Building Next Generation Web Apps Workshop at the inaugural Web 2.0 Expo 2008 NYC next month. I'll have more details about this deep-dive session in an upcoming post.

Web 2.0 Continues As Most Used New Internet Term

Dion Hinchcliffe — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:08:00 GMT

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 the 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 still 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 demand for a broad enough term that rightly captures 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 activities.
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, languages, as well as types of people and culture has fostered an interesting phenomenon. Namely, 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.

And Web 2.0 isn't standing still, we certainly haven't figured out all the ways that we can leverage the network yet. As we start thinking beyond Web 2.0 we begin considering where sensor-gathered information of every description, location-awareness (the iPhone will drive this like few other devices today), and the glimmerings of semantic capability, we can see that eventually Web 2.0 will -- like Web 1.0 -- evolve into something else in its own right.

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.

The Growth of Open APIs: More Evidence That Web Services Drive Network Effects

Dion Hinchcliffe — Wed, 21 May 2008 09:59:00 GMT

A few days ago Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr released a graph (Figure 1 below) showing the growth of the bandwidth used by their global Web sites versus the bandwidth being consumed by their Web services. It's eye opening because of the dramatic growth in bandwidth being consumed by their customers via their various non-visual, data-only Web services. The adoption of Amazon's Web services is currently driving more network activity than everything Amazon does through their traditional Web sites. This is one of the key lessons of the 2.0 era: that the ultimate end-game generally boils down whoever has the deepest and most potent network effect, which are more pronounced when you're data and software is being used from many other Web apps, instead of just your own.

The graph below clearly shows that Amazon has the hockey stick growth that generally signifies a powerful, deep seated uptake by 3rd party platform users. It also underscores the exponential results that comes from leveraging the intrinsic nature of open networks like the World-Wide Web to enable rapid growth. This is spreading Amazon's platform to the far corners of the Internet in the way that Microsoft and IBM did so successfully with their own software platforms a generation ago, albeit in offline form.

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?

Endless Conversation: The Unfolding Saga of Blogs, Twitter, Friendfeed, and Social Sites

Dion Hinchcliffe — Wed, 14 May 2008 19:07:00 GMT

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 metrics
TwitterFeed - Link your blog activity to Twitter
TwitterGram - 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 followers
TwittEarth - A 3d animated globe that shows activity in the Twitter public timeline in near real-time
Twitt(url)y - A link aggregator that reports on link activity within the Twitterverse, a sort of Techmeme for Twitter
TwitSay - Use your phone to post to Twitter via a voice message
TwitterSnooze - Turn off a chatty user temporarily and bring them back automatically later
Twistori - An interesting dashboard that displays the expression of key memes from the Twitter public timeline, creating a sort of global collective intelligence
Twubble - 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 Changing

The 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 contacts via e-mail (the latter without much 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% Neither
What 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. They are also using these social media tools as a replacement for traditional e-mail. But 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 emerging 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 tweets 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.

Tips for Building Next Generation Web 2.0 Applications

Dion Hinchcliffe — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 20:30:00 GMT

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 as 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 increasingly 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 [Paul Buchheit.] 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're all playing in 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 enterprises are typically looking at doing with Web 2.0 applications. 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 call 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.

Social Aggregators Emerge To Manage Digital Lifestyles

Dion Hinchcliffe — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 19:48:00 GMT

It's beginning to look like 2008 might be the year of the social aggregator as users begin to employ these emerging new tools to better manage and track their various online relationships, both personal and professional. The introduction of these new Web applications, such as Friendfeed, Socialthing!, Spokeo, Second Brain, and Iminta, are making it easy for users to keep track of what their friends are doing online while simultaneously demonstrating that there are compelling alternatives to being social online without having to, say, actively maintain a Facebook account. In fact, that's the very premise of this new type of social Web utility, which automatically tracks a user's public activity at sites around the Web including blogs, Flickr, Twitter, del.icio.us and so on, and creates a single convenient feed for others to consume and track.

I've been evaluating a number of these applications over 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 aggregators are far from being mainstream yet and the long term staying power of these individual Web applications aren't clear either, 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 as well as a killer app mobile entry. 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.

The Social Graph: Issues and Strategies in 2008

Dion Hinchcliffe — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:39:00 GMT

One of the hottest topics in the online world in the last couple of years has been the growth of social networking services such as Facebook and MySpace, as well as the addition of a social element to existing user experiences. Despite riding several waves of hype, it's now clear that the social networking space will only get hotter in 2008 according to most watchers. Social software has come fully into its own as of 2008 -- for all appearances permanently -- and understanding the reasons for this rapid rise as well as figuring out how to leverage it best is the job of everyone who wants to make the most of the Web 2.0 era.

Gaining a deeper insight to the social networking phenomenon, now exhibited by the tens of millions of users employing them globally on a daily basis for both personal and businesses uses, currently means understanding the fundamental unit of the social network, also one of the biggest new buzzphrases of the year: the social graph. Fortunately, that's simple enough despite the term's oblique reference to graph theory, which it is heavily based upon.

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 2008

The 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 and Google has an interesting play in their OpenSocial initiative. 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.

Web 2.0 Predictions for 2008

Dion Hinchcliffe — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 18:16:00 GMT

It's the first work day of the new year and I thought I'd take some time to offer up my predictions for what will happen on the leading edge of the Internet this year. 2007 saw Web 2.0 -- defined here as the pervasive two-way Web used for social media, mashups, user-powered Web applications, and social networking -- go far more mainstream than it had in 2006. Web 2.0 poster children like MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube pushed their way into the top 10 Web sites globally and stayed there for virtually all of 2007. Fresh, new Internet startups were created by the hundreds (even thousands, if you count the innumerable garage and bedroom attempts) last year and that trend isn't going to stop any time soon and the reason is fairly obvious: The Web is simply the best place to create an incredibly scalable business for the least possible investment and effort.

However, that's not to say that it's easy to be successful online. It's not, and the history of the Internet startup arena is littered with failures large and small, and many -- even most -- startups will inevitably succumb if they don't provide a fairly compelling offering to the users of the Web. But fortunately for those that get the right mix of capabilities and user engagement in their online products, the upside can be nearly limitless. This fundamental fact helped drive the whole conception of Web 2.0: A new set of models and patterns creating Web sites and applications that looked at the best practices that actually worked from the success stories of the early Web. My point here is that the Web itself is in a state of perpetual evolution and we are all still learning a great deal all the time about what works and what doesn't and the industry tries innovative new ideas all the time. In this way, 2008 will continue to be a fascinating year as we see what history's largest ever business laboratory and incubator will turn out for us.

We are however assuredly seeing the maturation of the Web 2.0 industry, with many of the less successful online product plays falling by the wayside from first and second Web 2.0 wave as infamously tracked by Michael Arrington's Web 2.0 Deadpool, with only a few meteoric stars rising to the top. The good news: That doesn't mean there won't be many exciting and innovative new things happening online this year, if you only know where to look.

Here's my take on what we will see happen in 2008 in the Web 2.0 arena:

Web 2.0 Predictions for 2008

Open APIs finally go beyond free as successful business models emerge. Sites like Twitter are finding that their APIs get ten times the use of the site itself (Web 2.0 principle: A platform beats an application every time), but monetizing them is a challenge for all but a few major player such as Amazon. While you can charge for each transaction across the API boundary, that isn't appropriate for many types of API uses. Some have speculated that Twitter's API usage is making them the middle-man, like the cable companies are with broadband, but with no reasonable way to charge for API usage that typical users would accept. Companies will continue to experiment with techniques such as injecting ads in the API data to requiring a small yearly fee to open an API for an individual user so they can use apps built for it. However, at least one major new API monetization model will emerge in 2008 that will prove to have long term legs. My bet: The costs will increasingly be bundled into a Web 2.0 application's subscription fee or other business model, even if they use an API of the user's preference, such as Amazon's S3. This would require billing support from API vendors to chargeback for excessive use by a customer but it would work.

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 integrate enormous user reach (online, mobile, SNS) as well as function (software apps and 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 continues 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 design 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 a somewhat rocky second half of '08 for Android while Apple maintains its market lead with what is still the most Web-friendly communications device yet created by releasing a solid upgrade of the iPhone this year, perhaps even twice. Mobile Web 2.0 apps will continue to 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 such as 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 of Web usage -- with rich media apps in particular -- in our living rooms.
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: Ownership of data contributed to Web 2.0 sites becomes a growing public relations issue, though the average user won't care much this year. I added this because the growing brouhaha about Robert Scoble's blocked Facebook account reminded me that we'll continue see many sites attempt to control the data they receive from users in a very Web 1.0 way. This is somewhat surprising given it's 2008 and we've learned these lessons in the industry the hard way already. However, it's entirely correct that Web sites should maintain control over their valuable and hard to recreate data. A good example is how YouTube jealously protects its videos and doesn't let you download them, only view them on the site or through the badge. Yet the often contrarian nature of the Web sometimes requires the opposite of an action to get the desired effect. In this case, it turns out that the more control you give up, the more value you tend to get back. Sites that lock users in, prevent them from having the experiences they want, and exert excessive and unfair control, will lose in the end. See DataPortability.org and the GraphSync project, which aims to enable the open movement of a user's social graph, as examples of where all this is headed.

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.

The 6 essential things you need to know about Google's OpenSocial

Dion Hinchcliffe — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 18:37:00 GMT

I've spent the last few days keeping track of the seemingly endless stream of news and blog coverage about Google's new OpenSocial model for social networking applications. OpenSocial has been described by some as Google's industry "chess move" to outmaneuver and corner Facebook. This is fascinating set of developments to watch since Google's own growing social networking platform, Orkut, was eclipsed by Facebook in terms of overall traffic back in September.

Unless 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 central truism is that a platform beats an application every time. This 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 such an 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 in Facebook.

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 make 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 over 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 OpenSocial

OpenSocial 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. Social networking site APIs aren't anywhere as complex as say, the Windows APIs, but we've seen this before with platforms such as Java, where the development model can't support the full capabilities of the underlying operating systems. Like Java, write once, test everywhere is the name of the game for OpenSocial and while economies in this model certainly exist, a single universal widget model tends to discourage product differentiation in favor of broad distribution. This means to get at the full richness of the underlying platform and create a competitive product, you have do custom coding for that site and you've just broken the reason to use a common application model.
OpenSocial is largely based on open standards and there's only minor developer lock-in. Overall, it actually seems pretty safe to do a lot of your social application development using OpenSocial. It uses the essential browser open standards of XML, HTML, Javascript, and the data formats are all ATOM and RESTful/WOA. 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 including avoiding crufty proprietary markup. 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. Update: Michael Arrington has reported that the first OpenSocial app has now been hacked.
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 relatively useless, uninteresting apps amongst 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 has a plan to make that success work for it. 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.

The return of the Web 2.0 Blog and the latest: A Web 2.0 book, Enterprise 2.0, The New New Internet, and much more

Dion Hinchcliffe — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:07:00 GMT

It's been an incredible year in 2007 as we've continued to make our way on the "2.0" journey that we embarked upon last year. I thought I'd re-inaugurate this blog with my return to regular posting and to catch up our colleagues, friends, and contacts in the industry with what's been going on with us lately. The good news, much of our current hard work is over and I'm going to be returning more to writing and speaking in the near future, though I'm always going to work closely with clients.

Building a dedicated business around helping organizations transform themselves to the business models of the 21st century has proven to be no minor task. Founding Hinchcliffe & Company as well as creating our enormously popular Web 2.0 University, growing a close-knit passionate team, crafting a set of quality consulting and education products that we believe in, all the while keeping customers happy has been an enormous effort, consuming virtually all of our time. However, we've begun to see the fruits of our labor by seeing our clients and partners succeed in applying Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 to invigorate themselves, grow, and innovate. Along the way we have been rewarded with an absolutely top-notch set of clients and valued industry contacts.

As to our future, the good news is that the key catchphrases of our business, Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, seem to be as popular as ever. In fact, surprising as it seems for those of us who have been involved in them for the last few years, I believe that 2008 will be the first truly mainstream year for both of these of strategic new approaches to business and technology.

We have a lot of very exciting projects in the works that we'll announce over the next few months. I'm also pleased to go on record predicting that 2008 will be one of the most interesting years in the business as organizations begin to globally grapple in earnest with the disruptive business models of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 which we see advancing on virtually all industries and institutions today.

As I have in the past, I'm going to use this blog to cover mainstream Web 2.0 topics while using my ZDNet blog to focus specifically on enterprise applications of Web 2.0. Stay tuned.

What else have we been doing lately? Plenty as it turns out...

New Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 publications, education, events, and partnerships

A new Web 2.0 book. We've just help complete a major new book on the topic of Web 2.0 with Adobe's Duane Nickull and Redmonk's James Governor, due for publication from O'Reilly shortly. You can read James' take on it on his blog as well as Duane's recent blog overview of it.
A new Enterprise 2.0 course. Our Enterprise 2.0 Bootcamp has recently finished development after successful trials at major conferences such as Interop and the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. It will be offered shortly as part of Web 2.0 University. You can attend in locations around the world or it can be brought to your organization.
Refining the revolution. We recently posted our latest assessment of how to use Web 2.0 social platforms in the workplace in The State of Enterprise 2.0 on ZDNet.
A conference on Enterprise 2.0. I'm speaking at Avenue A | Razorfish's Reinventing the Enterprise summit this Friday in Boston, MA. I'll be covering the latest topics on Enterprise 2.0 along with Jimmy Wales, Andrew McAfee, and and Forrester's Rob Koplowitz.
A major event on Web 2.0 in Business. We are speaking at and sponsoring the East Coast's largest Web 2.0 conference, The New New Internet in Tyson's Corner, VA on November 1st, 2007. I'm hosting an armchair discussion with Salesforce.com's Peter Coffee and Amazon's Jeff Barr. There are still a few tickets left for this event, and you can use my special registration discount code at this link to save off the retail price of admission.
We help take Web 2.0 to Europe. Web 2.0 Expo Berlin is kicking off next month on November 5th. Mark the date, we'll be there to provide a half-day version of Web 2.0 University as a workshop on the first day. It was enormously popular at Web 2.0 Expo SF in April with over 600 people attending in a standing room only crowd. I'm also giving an extensively updated talk on the rise of Web widgets and new online distribution models which was also very popular at the last Expo.
Web 2.0 University(tm) is coming to DC. On November 16th, the world's leading learning event on Web 2.0 is coming to Washington, DC. Thousands of business leaders around the world have attended this strategic business event to rave reviews. Seating is limited to sign up now to make sure you're there. Web 2.0 University will also be given in Los Angeles, Atlanta, and San Francisco in the next few months.
We expand globally. We have recently licensed Web 2.0 University to one of the top consulting firms in Europe. Reply will exclusively deliver our leading courses courses to their clients and the general public in Italy and Germany. We've also established a partnership with LG CNS of Korea on bringing Web 2.0 consulting and education to Korea ( press release in Korean).
New faces. We've had some key new additions to our executive line-up. Denise Kalos and John Fandel have come over to us from O'Reilly Media and have deep experience with Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 solutions around consulting, education, and online communities that support Web 2.0 initiatives. Denise has joined us as Executive Vice President of Sales while John is Executive Vice President of Business Solutions. You can reach them at denise@hinchcliffeandco.com and jpfandel@hinchcliffeandco.com.

Please do keep in touch in comments below, via Facebook, or contact me directly at dion@hinchcliffeandco.com.

Note: Normally this blog is used exclusively for exploring Web 2.0 in all its facets but this is an update on what I've been doing the last few months and so it definitely mixes business and subject matter. Most posts are here have a minimum of business promotion and this post is a rare exception.

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference: Web 2.0 Continues Its Move To The Workplace

Dion Hinchcliffe — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 15:33:00 GMT

It's the second day of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference here at the Boston waterfront. Yesterday was the workshop day for the event as well as the much-ballyhooed showdown between Andrew McAfee and Tom Davenport, the original point of disagreement around the real impact of Enterprise 2.0 which I've covered before . Today the main conference sessions begin and a quick look at the show program tells you that an all-star cast of Enterprise 2.0 folks has been assembled here.

I was fortunate enough to be able to provide one of the morning workshops yesterday, an Intro to Social Computing, which I billed as a panoramic tour of the concepts and platforms of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 as well as a look at the organizing principles around how to create a strategy around them for your organization. If you weren't able to make it, Doug Cornelius has done a great job blogging a rather detailed summary of the session, which seemed to be quite popular with the audience overall.

The big debate between McAfee and Davenport yesterday can now be viewed on video on Veodia. I missed it personally since it ran during my workshop session, but by all accounts it was an informative debate, even if some felt that violent agreement frequently took place. You can read good coverage of debate here from Andrew McAfee, ZDNet's Dan Farber (who moderated the debate), and John Eckman, the latter which has a detailed transcript. For those of you who don't know it, Andrew McAfee is the Harvard Business School professor that defined the concept of Enterprise 2.0 last year. If you're trying to get a handle on all this, I definitely recommend that you watch the video of the debate or the first episode of our Enterprise 2.0 TV Show.

Is Web 2.0 Really Moving to the Workplace?

I'm a big believer in using measurable numbers to define the scope and importance of trends online. One thing I often do in my of my talks on Web 2.0 is to ask the audience to raise their hand if they have an easy to way to create a blog or wiki on their local Intranet. Last year at the Collaboration Technologies Conference (the event that was renamed this year to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference), I asked the question and just a handful of people raised their hand. Yesterday, in a crowd of around a hundred, about 10-15% raised their hand. Compared to the same question I ask audiences about LinkedIn usage (which have gone from that same handful last year to nearly 70%), and it's a telling indicator of how enterprises are lagging behind in adoption of these tools.

Andrew McAfee has described the SLATES mnemonic (details on it here) to capture the essential elements of an Enterprise 2.0 platform. The "A" in SLATES stands for Authorship, in that if workers don't have the ability to publicly author material that the rest of the organization can find, use, and otherwise leverage, then these tools simply won't be effective. Authorship is Step One in capturing the otherwise hidden and lost knowledge that is the submerged "iceberg" of information that is still not kept in the IT systems of a typical organization (i.e. "tacit instituational knowledge). And my informal surveys over the last year have shown little practical growth here.

The bottom line is that the Enterprise 2.0 story has a long way to go and we aren't going to see the results until the tools get into most worker's hands and organizations understand the key elements of success with Enterprise 2.0. Fortunately, the grassroots side of the Enterprise 2.0 story is quite good and informal data there suggests that workers are bringing these tools in to their organizations on their own when they're not being provided for them. This has positive and negative ramifications both but it does indicate that E2.0 has serious momentum on the ground on its own.

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.

Web 2.0 Software Models Evolve as the Conference Season Begins in Earnest

Dion Hinchcliffe — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 09:44:00 GMT

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 takes place. It looks like this will be capped off (at least in the first half of the year) by the expected industry blockbuster this year, the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco right in the middle of April.

In fact, there are a great many aspects to the way that the Web is changing and evolving in early 2007 and Ajax is only one of the elements of Web 2.0, yet it gets so much attention because it's enabling the browser to close the gap between what a Web app can do vs. a native PC application. It's also the most visually obvous (and entirely optional) aspect of a Web 2.0 application. But one things this is clear this year: Web 2.0 software models are beginning to evolve across the board.

On the Ajax side this includes everything from very exciting major changes to the Ajax Framework Dojo expected to deliver the 1.0 version this year that businesses can finally commit upon, to real offline Ajax coming of age with everybody from Brad Neuberg (details here ) to Quinebox working on making sure Web apps can literally work any time, anywhere, on or off the network, which is one of the most serious complaints about Web apps for serious work use. As for rich media (which Ajax can't do), the Flash platform is really starting to rise as well and Adobe -- which owns outright one of the few remaining vendor controlled technologies that helps run the Web today -- has Flex 2 and Apollo which could really change the RIA landscape this year. OpenLaszlo also tells a compelling story in this space as does Microsoft with WPF/E. This year really will begin the RIA technology war it seems.

Even more intriguing, we are seeing the emergence of genuine open Web component models such as what NetVibes has come up with recently with their cross platform widget API, known as the Universal Widget API, encouraging open, cross site widget compatibility. Netvibes has made our best Web 2.0 software list two years in a row and for good reason, they remain the best Ajax start page out there and they also get how to fully leverage the Web. Finally, if you're not sure why widgets are a make or break aspect of a successful Web app today, check out my two part series (Part 1 , Part 2) on the fast rise of the DIY (aka Do it Yourself) era.

There's far, far more going on with Web 2.0 of course than the user interface story, and Architectures of Participation, social media, and the many other relentless changes taking place on the Web are often the core of the value. But as I say often, rich user experiences are now a virtually essential checkliist item for high quality Web software. When presented with a static Web page vs. a satisfying, immersive rich experience, user's will vote for the latter nearly every time. And in the flat competitive environment of the Web, you can't afford having the product that's not providing it.

Lots more soon from New York City as AjaxWorld proper gets underway tomorrow morning (Ajax Bootcamp is today which I'm leading off), we expect many announcements and new development. Stay tuned!

Best Practices and Challenges in Building Capable Rich User Experiences: Announcing Real-World Ajax

Dion Hinchcliffe — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 23:51:00 GMT

It's been nearly a year in the making but I'm finally pleased to announce the release of Real-World Ajax, a massive new compendium of the Ajax spectrum that I've compiled and edited with Kate Allen in conjunction with leading Ajax authors from across the country. While not generally available until later this month, with full availability on March 19th at the AjaxWorld Conference and Expo which I co-chair with SYS-CON Media's Jeremy Geelan, this book marks a significant milestone in the brief history of Ajax, rich user experiences in general, and the growing challenges and opportunities in this space as we continue to witness a tectonic shift in the way Web apps are designed and built.

The inevitable conclusion: The Web page metaphor is just no longer a compelling model for the majority of online Web applications. We are now rapidly leaving the era where static HTML is acceptable to the users and customers of our software. Combined with the rise of badges and widgets, the growing prevalence of the Global SOA to give us vast landscapes of incredibly high value Web services and Web parts, it's important to note that the use of Ajax is essential to even start exploiting these important trends. Skirting the corners of this phenomenon are also the non-trivial challenges offered up by largely abandoning the traditional model of the browser. Specifically, what happens to search engine optimiziation (SEO), disabled accessibility, link propogation (along with network effects), Web analytics, traditional Web user interface conventions, and more, which are all dramatically affected -- often broken outright -- by the Ajax Web application model?

Some of these questions are answered directly in Real-World Ajax, but many are as yet relatively unanswered in an industry struggling to deal with a major mid-industry change. The tools, processes, and technologies we've brought to bear to build Web applications are going to change a lot, as well as the skill sets. As I wrote in my Seven Things Every Software Project Needs to Know About Ajax , these types of rich Web applications require serious software development skills, particularly as the browser is a relatively constrained environment compared to traditional software development runtime environments like Java and .NET.

Of course, despite this issues -- even because of them -- it is a very exciting time to be in the Ajax business right now. One big reason is that there are few Ajax products with clear market dominance yet and the dozens and dozens of Ajax libraries and frameworks currently available often a very diverse and compelling set of options for use as the foundation of the next great Ajax application. While the Dojo Toolkit is probably the Ajax toolkit with the largest mindshare and lots of industry interest, the big vendors such as Microsoft and their Microsoft's ASP.NET Ajax (aka Atlas) show that the story is just as the first major products from big vendors make their way to market. There's little doubt that we'll continue to see the Ajax market maturing and I'm looking forward to a variety of upcoming improvement to Ajax such as Project Tamarin, the high-speed Javascript engine donated by Adobe to the Mozilla project, the ongoing evolution of OpenAjax, and the 1.0 release of Dojo sometime this year, to name just a few of the exciting things that have the potential to ensure Ajax continues to grow and evolve.

While we expect that Real-World Ajax will give you a front row seat to the thinking and techniques of some of the industry's best and brightest, here's a short list of things that are still not generally well known about Ajax:

Underappreciated But Important Facts about Ajax

Ajax is based completely on the open standards of the Web. Based entirely on XHTML, CSS, ECMAScript (the name of the standard for Javascript), and even XMLHTTPRequest, Ajax itself is nothing more than a technique that blends together open Internet standards that no vendor currently controls. When used carefully, Ajax results in applications that are built on the Web as a true software platform, and as such means that there's no vendor lock-in, no licensing fees, and nobody to control the direction and destiny of your application but you. That doesn't mean that many of the most popular Ajax frameworks don't break these standards in some minor ways, but with initiatives like OpenAjax, this too will be addressed soon enough.
Currently, Ajax cannot be a complete rich user experience solution. Even with pretty darn cool things that can be done with Canvas 3D and SVG support (the Dojo clock), there is just something Ajax cannot do: true rich media. That means that Web apps that want to offer features that include video and audio must use another method of doing so, usually the Flash plug-in. With some of the most effective new Web apps such as YouTube being rich media driven, this poses a significant challenge to the Ajax approach. For now, a rich Internet application strategy simply must include a blend of Ajax and Flash and the attendant complexity in testing, skill sets, and integration. Unfortunately, this has implications for the previous point since one particular vendor does control Flash at this time: Adobe.
Almost all of the initial disadvantages of Ajax can now be countered. Everything from search index addressability to accessibility to offline access and local storage has been addressed in one form or another. The techniques for resolving issues with bookmarking, the browser's back button, page view analytics and others all currently have well documented work arounds or even entire frameworks that address them head on. While memory leaks in the browser and the limited abilities of Javascript timers pose challenges still, they are no longer enough alone to hold back the majority of Web application development projects. While freeform drawing and accelerated 3D graphics are also on the short list of Ajax capabilities not supported by more than a few browsers, these too are being addressed rapidly either by recent browser upgrades or interesting new plug-ins like WPF/E which will soon be common.

As for Real-World Ajax itself, I'd like to give thanks to the large team of expert authors we assembled to give you what we believe is the most complete picture yet on the Ajax user experience, one of the key planks of Web 2.0. Not only does the material in Real-World carefully go over the basic Ajax technologies such as DHTML, XHTML, and CSS but there is also in-depth coverage of mobile Ajax, enterprise Ajax, and even a complete chapter that often fails to get enough coverage in the Ajax world: security. Finally, the book includes several complete working Ajax applications as well as the video sessions from most of our previous AjaxWorld events. A big thanks to Nancy Valentine, Yakov Fain, Richard Walter, Kate Allen, Jeremy Geelan, and Fuat Kircaali for making the book possible and to our great complement of Ajax authors: Jim Benson, Jason Blum, Kurt Cagle, John Crupi, Luis Derechin, Jay Fienberg, Corey Gilmore, Rob Gonda, Kevin Hakman, Ajit Jaokar, Dietrich Kappe, David S. Linthicum, Phil McCarthy, Dan Malks, Scott Preston, Anil Sharma, Coach Wei, and Greg Winton.

See you in New York City at AjaxWorld Conference and Expo later this month. Also, there will be a book signing event where you can meet many of the authors as well.

Social Media Goes Mainstream

Dion Hinchcliffe — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 20:51:00 GMT

While some will dispute what mainstream is defined as exactly -- with my own personal favorite being when my grandparents and their grandchildren both are doing whatever is under discussion -- the rise of consumer-powered media platforms has all the hallmarks of being something that's not only here to stay, but something that's increasingly pushing everything else off the stage. Yes, I'm talking about blogs, but also wikis and every other kind of two-way, user controlled participation tool that is currently proliferating on the Internet in every country and almost all demographics.

Now before I present my case for the mainstreaming of shared, collaborative media, we should more carefully define the term that captures this best: social media. Wikipedia of course has the most easily accessible definition of social media, describing it as "online tools and platforms that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other. Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. Popular social mediums include blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs." The key here is that people are the ones that use and control these tools and platforms instead of organizations and large institutions. Further, I would add to this that social media platforms tend to work best in networked environments , particularly on the Web, but also behind firewalls though to a lesser degree. Why is the networked aspect so important? Primarily because it's a powerful democratizing force due to its pervasive, low cost nature; anyone can get in the conversation with only a small investment of their personal time and access to a network. And since communication is essentially free over computer networks today, combining an architecture of participation powered by network effects makes social media platforms almost certainly the most powerful form of media yet created.

These todays anyone posting anything on a simple blog lets them automatically reach the 1.1 billion users on the Web today. And with syndication, social media content is picked up and spread throughout Internet via feed engines and the entire syndication ecosystem and can be found by anyone looking for information via Technorati, Google Blog Search, TechMeme or dozens of other innovative discovery mechanisms. At long last, hundreds of years after the invention of the printig press, anyone can truly reach a global audience by spending a couple of minutes of their time creating a blog on one of the hundreds of free blog sites. I've highlighted in the past how social media has been used in both emergent and deliberate fashion to do everything from locating the survivors of natural disasters to motivating end-users en masse to create online video advertisements for a major corporation.

Of course, any effective technique or phenomenon has those who attempt to co-opt it or copy it, the latter which is the most sincerest form of flattery. The recent Public Relations 2.0 flap, which ostensibly boiled down to whether or not traditional organizations can even conceive of how these new freeform platforms work, was a good example of how institutions firmly grounded in the 20th century struggle to understand the power shift under way. Because these platforms are no longer under anyone's control for the very reason that the Web is a system without an owner, except all of us together.

Bounding the Social Media phenomenon

But how significant is this really? What are the compelling datapoints that tell use that social media is changing the landscape of communication, collaboration, and personal interaction? David Sifry's quarterly State of the Blogosphere, most recently updated in October, is an excellent place to start. Taking a look at this, we can tracking over 57 million blogs, with over 900,000 blog posts a day on just about any conceivable subject. 3 million new non-spam blogs were created in just the most recent 3 months of tracking. But blogs are primarily text and there are many other forms of social media and so it's worth looking at podcasting and video, two important types of social media that are growing rapidly with the spread of high quality, fast Internet connections. Fortunately or unfortunately, unlike blogs, podcasts or video sharing do not have their own syndication system and for the most part they just ride inside the existing RSS/ATOM feed systems. This makes it hard to discern what is really happening and so we can only pull on some individual data points such as Google Trends data showing the rapid rise of podcasting as a search term.

The video side of social media is a bit easier, which Hitwise and YouTube providing enough hard data on the most recent version of the YouTube Fact Sheet to get a general though unscientific impression of what's happening there. According to this, YouTube has 60% of all online video viewers with up to 70 million viewers in an evening and over 65,000 videos uploaded every day, making it both the #1 online video site and #1 social video sharing site online. This implies that most video consumption on the Web is already based on social media, and that there are over 115 million online viewers of video overall. At least for video, social media is not an edge case and is they dominant model overall. Note: Yes, one can quibble about whether YouTube is truly a social media site and certainly it skirts the concept but in my book it makes the list.

Why is YouTube considered Social Media though? What aspects does it -- any many of the most successful media sites -- have that make it social and non-coincidentally so popular? To understand this best, it's worth creating a list of what exactly must an aspiring social media platform actually have in order to be considered such. Here is my take, culling the capabilities and features of the most popular social media sites as well as the consensus of leading thinkiners in this space such as Stowe Boyd, Tina Sharkey, and others.

Defining Social Media: Some Ground Rules
(as we understand them circa January 2007)

Communication in the form of conversation, not monologue. This implies that social media must facilitate two-way discussion, discourse, and debate with little or no moderation or censorship. In other words, the increasingly ubiquitious comments section of your local blog or media sharing site is NOT optional and must be open to everyone.
Participants in social media are people, not organizations. Third-person voice is discouraged and the source of ideas and participation is clearly identified and associated with the individuals that contributed them. Anonymity is also discouraged but permissible in some very limited situations.
Honesty and transparency are core values. Spin and attempting to control, manipulate, or even spam the conversation are thoroughly discouraged. Social media is an often painfully candid forum and traditional organizations -- which aren't part of the conversation other than through their people -- will often have a hard time adjusting to this.
It's all about pull, not push. Like John Hagel and John Seely Brown observed in the McKinsey Quarterly a year ago or so, push-based systems, of which one-way marketing and advertising and command-and-control management are typical examples are nowhere near as efficient as pull systems. Pull systems let people bring to them the content and relationships that they want, instead of having it forced upon them by an external entity. Far from being a management theory, much of what we see in Web 2.0 shows the power of pull-based systems with extremely large audiences. As you shape a social media community, understanding how to make embrace pull instead of push is one of the core techniques. In social media, people are in control of their conversations, not the pushers.
Distribution instead of centralization. One often overlooked aspect of social media is the fact that the interlocutors are so many and varied. Gone are the biases that inevitably creep into information when only a few organizations control the creation and distribution of information. Social media is highly distributed and made up of tens of millions of voices making it far more textured, rich, and heterogeneous than old media could ever be (or want to be). Encouraging conversations on the vast edges of our networks, rather than in the middle, is what this point is all about.

The rise of social media platforms within businesses, often dubbed Enterprise 2.0 , will place a significant challenge on organizations as they try to grapple with the ground rules above. That's because not following them will tend to reduce the long-term success and effectiveness of social media in business. Also, increasingly, as more and more time and world-wide attention is given to social media, who really owns the discussions online will become a bigger and bigger deal. YouTube recently announced they will begin paying their users for their video contributions (which are the seeds for often virulent conversation on that site), but they still place far too many restrictions on the content that is uploaded including making it belong to YouTube.

Both of these trends show that when users are in control via the highly democratizing tools of the Web, the fundamental ground rules change. Understand them, follow them, and embrace them, this is the pre-eminent media model for the 21st century.

These aren't the only rules for social software however, just social media in particular. Be sure to check out my Notes on Making Good Social Software for more good ideas.

What else did I miss? What makes social media uniquely what it is?

Product Development 2.0

Dion Hinchcliffe — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 21:20:00 GMT

While the window on using the "2.0" suffix is probably closing, I thought it would be worthwhile to explore an especially significant trend in 2006 that will likely see much more widespread uptake in 2007. Specifically, I'm talking about building highly competitive online products by turning over non-essential control to users directly via the Web. For now, I'm calling this online business trend "Product Development 2.0", a concept that embodies the use of Web 2.0 concepts such as harnessing collective intelligence, users as co-creators, and turning applications into platforms, three of the most powerful techniques in the Web 2.0 arsenal.

What is Product Development 2.0 exactly? It's an informal term I'm applying to something that online startups and traditional businesses both are increasingly doing: leveraging of mass user contributions, providing open architectures for others to build on as they like, and even handing control over key product decisions directly to users. The reasoning behind doing this is simple: Satisfied customers have always been essential to having the most successful business, both online and offline. But how best can you ensure that they get exactly what they want from you, as customized and quickly as possible? This is where the scale, new tools, and business models of Web 2.0 have stepped in, giving us the potential to provide our customers with better, rich products, much more quickly, and with more of what they want. Taken as a whole, it's increasingly clear that there are new business models afoot that are just now being well understood.

Given that any business typically is vastly outnumbered by its customers and potential customers, and that putting a bureaucratic, centralized product development team into the critical path of product creation and ongoing maintenance highlights how little we can actually serve them, especially in an individualized way. And with everyone online, it's increasingly obvious where the biggest source of talent, engagement, innovation, agility, and worker bandwidth really lies: with your customers. Using the techniques and technologies that have emerged in just the last few years, you can now finally give them the tools and motivation to tweak, tune, refine, and contribute to your products and services. And increasingly, they'll probably do it. YouTube is still currently one of the best examples of user co-development of a world-class product in its pure form (65,000+ videos uploaded by users per day), but sites like eBay, Slashdot, and many others have been leveraging their users in product development for a long time now. And as it turns out, Product Development 2.0 is not a small topic and starts off at collecting explicit user contributions, leveraging the Database of Intentions, and putting in automated real-time feedback loops to identify the best or most popular new content or capabilities for other users that come along later.

It's important to note that it's a fundamental shift for a business to turn over a large part of its product development to its users, becoming more of a mediator and facilitator than a product creator or owner. This is the shift of control from institutions to individuals that the apparently relentlessly democratizing force of the Web has begun exerting on the business models of organizations of every description around the world. As more organizations figure out how to apply Product Development 2.0 to their individual offerings, they will reap significant competitive advantage over those not harnessing the Web to directly connect to customers and begin a rapid and never-ending innovation cycle. This is another aspect of the perpetual beta concept that reflects the fact that increasingly, products and services online are never finished, and indeed, can't ever be finished as changes and additions seamlessly pour in over thousands of millions of Internet connections.

But enough about the possibilities. Let's talk some examples, both in terms of what older style product development did vs. what this new style is doing. Finally, let's talk about some companies actually doing this successfully. Note: Incidentally, though I normally write about services in terms of Software as a Service (SaaS) or Web Services, for the purposes of this discussion I'm talking about non-physical business processes for sale, such as car or medical insurance, tax preparation, etc. and not software.

Like the recently discussed Programming 2.0 concept -- a set of software development tools, techniques, and attitudes that is, not incidentally, enabling much of this -- and the original Web 2.0 definition, it is examples in lieu of principles that's one of the best ways to paint a picture of what appears to be happening in the evolution of product development:

The Move to Product Development 2.0

	Product Development 1.0	Product Development 2.0
Primary Customer Interaction Channel:	Telephone, Mail, Face-to-Face, One Way Media (Print, TV, Radio, etc.), e-mail	World Wide Web, e-mail, IM
Source of Innovation:	Organizations	Customers
Innovation Cycle:	Months, Years	Minutes, Hours, Days, Weeks
Content Creators:	Internal Producers	External Producers
Feedback Mechanisms:	Market research, satisfaction surveys, complaints, focus groups	Analytics, online requests, user contributed changes
Customer Engagement Style:	Controlled, well-defined process	Spontaneous and chaotic
Product Development Process:	Upfront design	Less upfront, much more emergent
Product Architecture:	Closed, not designed for easy extension or reuse by others; walled garden	Open, very easy to extend, refine, change and add on to, ecosystem friendly, designed (and legal) for widespread remixing and mashups
Product Development Culture:	Hierarchical, centralized, Not Invented Here, somewhat collaborative, expert-driven	Egalitarian, decentralized, remix instead of reinvent, highly collaborative, Wisdom of Crowds
Product Testing:	Internal, dedicated test groups, hand-picked select customers	Users as testers
Customer Support:	Customer Service	User Community
Product Promotion:	One-Way Marketing and Advertising	Viral propagation, explicit leveraging of network effects, word of mouth, user generated and other two-way advertising
Business Model:	Product Sales, Customer Service and Support Fees, Service Access Charges, Servicing High Demand Products	Advertising, Subscriptions, Product Sales, Servicing All Product Niches (The Long Tail), Unintended Uses
Customer Relationship:	External Buyer (Consumer)	Partner and -- increasingly remunerated -- Supplier (Consumers as Producers )
Product Ownership:	Institution, particularly executive management and shareholders	Entire User Community
Partnering Process:	Formal, explicit, infrequent, mediated	Ad hoc, thousands of partners online, disintermediated
Product Development and Integration Tools:	Heavyweight, formal, complex, expensive, time-consuming, enterprise-oriented	Lightweight, informal, simple, free, fast, consumer-oriented
Competitive Advantage:	Superior products, legal barriers to entry (IP protections), brand name advantage, price, popularity, distribution channel agreements	#1 or #2 market leader, leveraging crowdsourcing effectively, mass customization, control over hard-to-create data, end-user sense of ownership, popularity, cost-effective customer self-service, audience size, best-of-breed architectures of participation

It's worth noting a couple of key points about the table above. One is that the Web makes the shift of control possible by putting every business in direct contact with every one of its customers. No small system can remain unchanged by sustained contact with a much larger system, and this means that any business (which is the small system in this scenario) which embraces its customers over the Web in a two-way fashion will likely undergo a move fairly quickly from the first column to the second. The fact is, if you have loyal customers who like the products and services that you offer online, you're going to have a hard time avoiding the shift of control and opening up of your product designs and architecture.

The second is that those that play to the strengths of the Web as platform, instead of trying to fight it, can exploit the most powerful software platform, or indeed, platform of any kind, that has been created to date. Triggering network effects, building an extensible platform out of our product offerings (whether it's an online software application or if you're an insurance company, doesn't matter), and you can see the advantage to be had in the assyemtric model of business on the Web; all of the potential is on the edge of our networks now (where the users are) instead of the middle. And waiting too long to enter the Product Development 2.0 arena potentially means waiting for your competitors to get their ahead of you. And the longer you wait to get the clock started on collected the Database of Intentions (continuously turning 100% of all customer interaction into enriching your product dynamically), the more likely you will face competitive dislocation and even lock-out. Amazon is famous for collecting user contributions to enrich their product database and they are about a decade ahead of potential competitors of in terms of the enriched, hard-to-recreate database they have built.

Now on to a few examples to highlight what companies are actually doing that has many of the elements of Product Development 2.0. First, the usual preamble about checklists of features; just like Web 2.0, one doesn't have to implement every one of these in order to deliver better results, just the ones that apply in your situation. So let's look at a couple of stories of companies -- and I have many others I'll be sharing as soon as I can -- that are going part of the way down the Product Development 2.0 path and getting valuable early experience. I selected real-world companies since that's the majority of companies that have to figure out whether they're going to play in this space or let others do it for them.

Product Development 2.0 Examples

XM Radio is a satellite radio provider that has recently embraced some of the tenets of Product Development 2.0. Compellingly, the Top 20 on 20 channel is one of the most popular channels XM has yet created. Why? Because control of it has been entirely handed over to its users. Says the Wikipedia entry on Top 20 on 20: "The channel plays everything new from rock to rap, with the songs chosen by online votes to the XM website. One can also vote their favorite songs by calling the station number, or text messaging. The channel is completely automated by listener voting with no DJ interruption. [DH- My emphasis] Top 20 on 20 is also one of the most popular music channels on XM. According to XM's internal research, the channel achieves 1.8 million listeners a week." And though the channel was relaunched with some changes in December that have proven unpopular to many (less music, live DJs), it presents the cautionary tale of what happens when you assert bureaucratic authority over something that you've co-developed with your users; the possibility that you'll kill the goose that lays the golden eggs of user contribution and engagement.

General Motors conducted its highly innovative Chevy Apprentice campaign early last year and made quite a demonstration of convincing users by the thousands to generate online video commercials for its new Chevy Tahoe SUV. By opening up the contest to anyone on the Web and only screening submissions for truly objectionable content they were able to elicit a stunning 22,000 user generated commercials exhibiting an impressive variety of creativity with both positive and negative messages. From the beginning of the effort, they realized that in a freeform environment created by Web 2.0 tools, that they would only be able to respond to criticism and not control the message. As expected, environmentalists famously picked up the tools to create ads savaging SUVs in general but GM's Ed Peper understood that only by engaging in conversation instead of censoring dissent could they gain trust and get more information into people's hands than they could otherwise. Ultimately, GM created its own ads that highlighted the high amount of recycled parts and the best fuel-efficiency in its class of the Tahoe. A brave piece of Product Development 2.0 for sure and one that many traditional business followers probably viewed incredulously as GM truly let their customers and potential customers co-create their advertising campaign with them on the world stage. For the curious: You can see the many Chevy Apprentice commercials still up on YouTube.

The Potential for Disruption and Opportunity

The Web is a fundamentally different platform from any platform we've seen before. Unlike previous general-purpose platforms, the Web is fundamentally communications-oriented instead of computing-oriented. Sure, computing still happens but what the Web does that's so important is its ability to connect information and people together. The hyperlink is the intrinsic unit of thought on the Web . So, it's information connected by links instead of programs that operate on data, that's the basic difference. But why does this hold the potential to put traditional product development on its head and usher in Product Development 2.0? 1) Because the aforementioned information can now truly be generated by anyone. And 2) because we're all nearly universally connected to this new medium by the devices on our desktops, in our briefcases, and in our pockets. All of us can now be directly and continuously connected to the products and services which we need, which increasingly, is the rest of us and not a handful of large companies. The very best companies in the future are likely ones that will create innovative new ways to facilitate innovation and collaboration by the hundreds of millions of us that can be reached and embraced by effective architectures of participation. The big winners will enable us and encourage us to take control, contribute, shape, and direct the designs of the products and services that we in turn consume.

The good news: Only a few industry leaders and early adopters fully appreciate the significance of these trends as yet or even how to fully exploit and monetize them. There's still enormous opportunity, and for existing businesses with large investments in existing business models, blowing your business model up before someone else does will be the order of the day. This will prove though very hard for most to do successfully. And therein lies the potential for significant industry disruption in the next 5 years as new players with core competency in Product Development 2.0 push older, slow-to-adapt businesses off the stage.

While this is far-fetched for some, effectively embracing the Web is key to business success today. Why do you think this will or won't be the ultimate future of how we do business?

The Best Web 2.0 Software of 2006

Dion Hinchcliffe — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 23:40:00 GMT

Looking back over 2006 it's clear that we've experienced one of the most remarkable growth surges in Web application history. Literally hundreds of Web sites and applications were launched this year and brought to our attention via the popular review sites like Michael Arrington's TechCrunch, Pete Cashmore's Mashable , and Emily Chang's eHub. And our very popular list of last year's Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005 was ultimately read by hundreds of thousands of readers in over a dozen languages. This makes it clear that not only is the ongoing supply of capable, online software flowing freely but that there is high-demand from the general Web populace as well.

The overall trend: We have begun moving all our software, data, and even our social activities onto the Web en masse and the demand for high-quality online sites and applications that support this shift in primary focus from the PC to the Internet is there in vast numbers (there are now 1 billion users on the Web today). The net result is that 2006 brought us some of the best online applications ever created and you can see the results for yourself below.

Last year's Web 2.0 software list we had a variety of categories ranging from Image Storing and Sharing to Web-Based Word Processing. Since then, the scope of Web applications has broadened considerably as has the definition of Web 2.0 itself, which has formalized and settled a bit as well. This reflects the real diversity in online applications from every kind of social media site to online productivity apps. Thus this year's categories have been consolidated and new categories added. Most notably I've added a Office 2.0 Suite category to cover the growing lists of ensemble software sites such as Zoho's Office Suite that are increasingly treading squarely on the integrated feature set that traditional productivity suites like Microsoft Office and Open Office. We've also added an Honorable Mentions section to reflect the fact that some of the new Web applications are so innovative that they nearly defy description but clearly deserve to be highlighted.

So I hope you enjoy touring the applications on this list. Finally, this list is entirely subjective and any errors or omissions are mine alone. You may not agree with some of the software I've listed but this isn't a one-way web; I definitely encourage you to list anything you feel we missed or got wrong below in the comments (and last year we received hundreds of submissions via comments). Please use the wiki link syntax ([url text_desc]) in the comments to make sure you embed plenty of good links.

Note: The site did not have to launch in 2006 to make this list, it just had to provide the best offering in a given category during the calendar year.

The Best Web 2.0 Software of 2006

Category: Social Network

Best Offering: MySpace

Description: The pre-eminent granddaddy of all social networking sites, MySpace needs no introduction. And while it's taken hit in numerous quarters for the quality of its users and content, for its lack of attractiveness, and even garnered a reputation for being a somewhat unsafe place to socialize online, it's still far and away the leader in terms of users. Easy to use and very customizable, MySpace offers some of the best user experience as well. And users apparently agree. If you take a look at the (unscientific and off-the-cuff) Alexa traffic chart of the other top social networking sites, you'll see that MySpace remains an absolute juggernaut. And it's because of this very fact MySpace remains the place where the most users are and there are now those fully taking advantage of that fact. A key trend: Businesses are increasingly opening up storefronts on MySpace. Why? It's easy to do and a great draw for customers in a younger demographic. Hollywood has taken to promoting its films with MySpace profiles and countless companies are using it has a marketing and advertising platform such as HBO with their Entourage car giveaway earlier this year. And while commercialism of just about any new media is inevitable, it reaffirms that MySpace remains the king. That's not to say that plenty of other good social networking sites don't exist. But they simply can't come close to matching in terms of scale, which means MySpace remains the most significant online community today.

Runners Up:

Category: Start Pages

Best Offering: Netvibes

Description: Netvibes won this category in last year's list and also gets the #1 spot this year. The start page pheneomenon has been an interesting online Web app trend that got underway in 2005 with the release of numerous different products in this space. In short, start pages provide a roaming desktop that can host all of a user's most common Web information such as news, weather, e-mail, RSS feeds, and more, all in a single user-controlled Web page. My overview of these earlier this year on ZDNet was Slashdotted, just another indicator of the apparent popularity of these personalized Web desktops, usually powered by Ajax but often by Flash as well. During 2006 however, not many of these products saw serious growth and their visitor traffic growth has been slow. Except for Netvibes that is, which has been growing month by month by offering things like an extremely polished look and feel, localization in many different languages, and open API. The last piece is critical for allowing others to add to and build upon the Netvibes platform (turning applications into platforms being a key Web 2.0 technique) and result of this shows clearly in the Netvibes product. The Netvibes developer ecosystem is vibrant and growing with over 500 different add-on modules from Comic of the Day to a module that will quickly turn any document into a PDF file. While Live.com has much more overall traffic than Netvibes, it's likely due to Microsoft's own mega-ecosystem since personalization has moved to the back burner of the front page of Live.com and has been upstaged by Microsoft's search engine. Click here for a more complete list of existing start pages.

Runners Up:

Category: Social Bookmarking

Best Offering: StumbleUpon

Description: StumbleUpon has unseated last year's winner, del.icio.us. Search engines like Google can help you find the material you're looking for using keywords, but social bookmarking sites can let you directly harness the collective intelligence of other users on the Web the directly share personal interests with you. Theoretically, this can help you find what you're looking for better, but what it really ends up doing is helping you find things that you never knew existing, but wished you did. StumbeUpon installs a toolbar in your browser and lets you collaborative rate content. This improves the recommendations for other users and behavior matching is used to find users like you and pages that you haven't seen before, on-demand. One indicator I use for the popularity of a social bookmarking site is how much inbound traffic I get from it, and I've seen a clear switch during the year from del.icio.us bookmarks to StumbleUpon referrers. StumbleUpon reports that it has over 1.7 million registered users and growing. Bottom Line: Del.icio.us is still my favorite bookmarking service, but for true content discovery, StumbleUpon now makes it much easier to find new content than del.icio.us does. StumbleUpon is a winner by a nose for taking content discovery to the next step.

Runners Up:

Category: Peer Production News

Best Offering: Netscape.com

Description: In a decision that likely won't be agreed with by the users of last year's winner in this category, Netscape has been selected as the best all around peer production news site. Though Digg is more popular in terms of traffic than the next three most popular peer production news sites in this category combined (though only barely), Digg remains primarily a technology news site, with actual general purpose news seeping in occasionally around the edges. In contrast, Netscape consistently delivers news on its front page that is genuinely newsworthy and geared towards a broad audience, combined with a mature community that frequently engages in genuine civil discourse in the comments. This highlights the demographics of the site of course since peer production sites have the news stories delivered by their users and the top stories selected by other users. Thus Netscape currently provides the best overall mix of news content and community and wins this year's peer production news category.

Runners Up:

Category: Social Media Sharing

Best Offering: YouTube

Description: The rise of YouTube this year has been one of the most phenomenal rises of an online property in Internet history. With up to 100 million viewers in a given day and averaging 65,000 videos uploaded per day, YouTube has successfully leveraged network effects for growth and viral adoption with a success that few have ever equaled. Last year image sharing was the hot social media sharing play, but 2006 is clearly the year of video. You can find a video on just about anything you can think of on YouTube and its radical ease of use, innovative tagging infrastrcture, and drop-dead easy to host YouTube badge (with the Javascript snippet it for it right next to each and every video) sets the standard for the rest of the industry. The selection for this category was easy and YouTube was the clear choice.

Runners Up:

Category: Online Storage

Best Offering: Amazon's S3 with JungleDisk

with

Description: I did a round-up earlier this year of most of the leading online storage products (and there are many), but the one that I have ended up using the most by far and ultimately selecting as my permanent online storage solution is Amazon's terrific S3 storage Web services API combined with Jungle Disk for Windows Explorer integration. S3 stands for Simple Storage Service and that's exactly what it is. There's no limit to how much data you can store with S3, how much data you can transfer to and from your home or work PC from S3, and S3 is very fast, reliable, secure, and cheap. I now host hundreds of gigabytes of data in my S3 account for a few dollars a month and I can access it from anywhere I travel without having to worry about backups or otherwise maintaining my data to make sure it's not lost (Amazon does it all for you). While there are other good online storage solutions, nothing comes close to the freedom and security of using S3 since Amazon is one of the leading Internet companies and will likely be around for a long time.

Runners Up:

Category: Office 2.0 Suite

Best Offering: Zoho Office Suite

Description: The Office 2.0 phenomenon become a true reality this year as just about any kind of business application could be found in a purely browser version. Zoho has been diligently releasing product and product this year and now has entire online productivity suite that has a word processor, spreadsheet, wiki, project management, presentation, contact management, and much more. While you can find the individual pieces from various other Web apps, Zoho provides a nice integrated, one-stop package that is very reminiscent of Microsoft Office. Microsoft and Google have been slow to get fully into this space and it may very well end up that smaller players establish dominance in an area that most expected the Big Two would dominate in this space. And an important space it is too: Online apps ultimately will be where our software and data is for most users, and establishing leadership in this product space with the Web as the only major new software paltform on the horizon is a major open opportunity.

Note: Last year I broke the individual categories of Office 2.0 out, and with the overall quality of such tools now being fairly consistent, I'm now highlighting the suite aspect as an important trend trend in 2006.

Runners Up:

Category: Honorable Mentions

Blog Filters: Like last year, Gabe Rivera's brilliant meme engine for the blogosphere still reigns supreme as far as taking the pulse of the conversation on the Web right now. And its permalinking structure with history support is just about the best example of Web design and content addressibility that I've seen. If you aren't using TechMeme daily to see what's going on, you don't know what you're missing.

Social Music: Online music doesn't get easier than Pandora, which has now become my favorite way to discover new music. Just a single Web page written in OpenLaszo, Pandora creates a custom radio station for every visitor in seconds based on the names of artists or songs you know, and then continously plays new music related to what you suggested. Now with social features, Pandora serves The Long Tail of music demand very nicely and is very easy to use and it shows: Pandora reportedly has over 2 million users.

Professional Social Network: 2006 was the year that having a LinkedIn profile was almost mandatory if you were in business, particularly now that all profiles have a URL. Almost everyone has received a LinkedIn invitation at some time or other, and LinkedIn really made it on the radar this year. While lacking robust social networking features such as blogging, LinkedIn's core functionality of maintaining a network of contacts that is automatically updated as people move around from job to job is just about the best out there.

Consumer Generated Advertising: The Chevy Apprentice campaign was just about the best example of a true Web 2.0 phenomenon as GM opened up the doors in early 2006 of a competition for anyone to create online videos about the Chevy Tahoe SUV, tends of thousands which were ultimately created and submitted. GM even left the negative ads up and sparked a real conversation about how much control of their marketing message should companies hand over to their customers. Since the original competition site is no longer online, click on the picture above or here to see the YouTube hosted copies of the ads that were created, some of which are very creative and are just as often negative as they are positive.

Online File Conversion: There is a growing list of online file conversion sites, but Zamzar has an impressive list of support file formats for documents (including MS Office docs), images, audio, and video including WMV, AVI, and many more. More importantly, the site is incredibly easy to use and very handy when you need to do an urgent file conversion while on the road or want to avoid the hassle of the numerous freeware downloads.

Web Application Stack: Ruby on Rails took a front seat this year as it become one of the most popular new ways to develop online database-driven software, Web 2.0-style (collective intelligence apps) or otherwise. I wrote up a more detailed story about Ruby on Rails for ZDNet that's worth reading if you want more details but the big take away is that Ruby on Rails is optimized for ease-of-development, extremely rapid results with little effort (10-20 times more productive that previous platforms like J2EE and .NET). I suspect that in 2007 the majority of new Web apps will be developed in Rails or PHP, they're just that much better.

Mashup Tool: While next year will see the release of a flood of end-user mashup tools, a few good ones hit this year, but DataMashups.com gets the credit for getting there first and with a surprisingly robust product. I recently wrote up the state of mashups for 2006 as well as a round-up of mashup tools , and while it's still an product space that is in its very early stages, the promise is impressive for users to soon be able to assemble the software solutions they need onthe fly. Expect the mashup tool market to start growing rapidly in 2007.

And that's it for now. And since this is a Web 2.0 blog, please do contribute your own mentions and nominations below and I'll do an update a few times with some of the best suggestions so we can make this the best Web software list of 2006.

The Web 2.0 Zeitgeist, 2006 Edition

Dion Hinchcliffe — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 04:47:00 GMT

The end of 2006 is nigh upon us and this blogger for one had a terrific time covering Web 2.0 for those of you that are interested in following the topic. Love or hate buzzwords, there's little question that subjects related to Web 2.0, from its convergence with SOA , to the rise of rich user experiences including Ajax, to a flood of exciting new largely user-powered online applications both inside and outside the firewall and much more, were all very popular with our readers and covered here in as much detail as possible.

2006 was filled with significant events for us with regards to the next generation of the Web. During the year we participated in Microsoft's SPARK event, helped organize The New New Internet conference with great appearances by Michael Arrington and Andrew McAfee, launched AjaxWorld magazine in its print edition as editor-in-chief , and delivered numerous talks around the country on RIAs and Web 2.0 design patterns and business models for conferences including Interop, AjaxWorld, Office 2.0, and many others.

A quick look at the trends tell us that 2007 is shaping up to be even bigger than last year as an even larger, more general audience continues to develop interest in the possibilities of applying Web 2.0 patterns and best practices deeply into the core of their products and services both existing and new. Harnessing collective intelligence via network effects and feedback loops became generally understood as the dominant design element of the Web 2.0 by most accounts. This was palpably reinforced by new and old companies alike including YouTube and MySpace gaining market dominance over industry leaders in just a score of months while Google and Amazon continued to use their years old network effect advantage to maintain leadership in their sectors.

But much of this entire story was driven directly by the increasing scale, size, speed and interconnectedness of the Web, making it easier than ever to reach out to tens of millions of potential users practically overnight via the 1 billion+ users that reside there in the biggest single marketplace in history. Continued performance improvements in a number of metrics has also made much of the Ajax and RIA phenomenon possible. This includes not just the speed of the Internet itself but the speed of the computers that the average user has as well. Thus, the dramatic performance improvements in the overall physics of the computing experience will just continue to push the envelope of what's possible on the Web in an essentially continuous fashion. Hopefully early adopters of the Internet such as the United States will continue investment in Internet infrastructure improvements and not let this trend languish.

While I'll save the predictions for where all this will lead in 2007 for another upcoming post, it seems clear that users, businesses, and other organizations that deeply embrace the fundamental nature of the Web as a communications-oriented platform without any single owner except all of us, will be the only ones able to fully exploit the possibilities of online applications. Because until now actionable ideas and techniques that directly explain what the most successful ways of building online software weren't well understood or easily accessible to most. The continually evolving model of what works and what doesn't in online applications design is currently labelled Web 2.0. And our tools and techniques finally started to adapt to these models this year and the rise of simplicity and optimization for Web-oriented systems as exemplified by the new applications stacks like Ruby on Rails, the growing adoption of lightweight protocols like RSS, ATOM, JSON, and REST, and network effect-powered business models including building hard-to-recreate sources of data and fully leveraging The Long Tail will become the norm. For now, the early adopters will be able to use techniques potentially heads and shoulders above their competition. What this will mean for those that fail to embrace this is something I'll cover in a my 2007 predictions post.

With a hat tip to Rod Boothby's idea of the same, here is a summary of our most popular material on Web 2.0 this year as judged by our readers. These are the top read posts of 2006 on this blog site with over 10,000 page views. I do hope you enjoy:

Top Web 2.0 Blog Entries for 2006

11. Thinking Beyond Web 2.0: Social Computing and the Internet Singularity (10,131 page views)

10. All We Got Was Web 1.0, When Tim Berners-Lee Actually Gave Us Web 2.0 (10,203 page views)

9. Notes on Making Good Social Software (10,485 page views)

8. The Ajax Spectrum (10,544 page views)

7. Why Ajax Is So Disruptive (11,320 page views)

6. Seven Things Every Software Project Needs to Know About Ajax (11,346 page views)

5. Web 2.0 Predictions for 2006 (16,531 page views)

4. Ten Ways To Take Advantage of Web 2.0 (21,666 page views)

3. Ruby on Rails 1.1: Web 2.0 on Rocket Fuel (29,204 page views)

2. The Most Promising Web 2.0 Software of 2006 (44,125 page views)

1. The State of Web 2.0 (50,147 page views)

Stay tuned for Web 2.0 Predictions for 2007 and The Best Web 2.0 Software of 2006, coming next week.

Time Magazine's Person of the Year: You and Web 2.0

Dion Hinchcliffe — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 01:31:00 GMT

Despite being considered so ten minutes ago in some corners of the the Internet, Time Magazine has selected Web 2.0 -- in particular those people that are directly shaping it -- as its esteemed Person of the Year. Specifically, Time Magazine has singled out you for recognition in this achievement and as the actual source of the exciting things happening on the Internet and in society today. Yes, that's you, reading this right now. At least if you've been contributing to the Web in some way using the increasingly ubiquitious tools and technologies ranging from the basic blog or wiki all the way up to video sharing platforms and social bookmarking sites.

But the truth of the matter is that just about any interaction with the Web at all generates new content of use to someone else (the so-called Database of Intentions ) and so that means frankly, if you're currently using the Web today even just to surf, you've become an integral part of this. "This" being a new generation of openness, sharing, and community powered by the Web that some think may be recognized in hindsight as breaking down important cultural barriers and institutions in a very similar fashion as what happened in the 1960's. True, it often doesn't seem like a revolution to us that see it growing bit and bit every day, but taken as a whole, there's now little doubt that the Web has become the most powerful, egalatarian, and knowledge rich platform in human history. Rapid evolution appears to have accelerated into a sort of revolution.

The Person of the Year cover story appears with the tagline that "in 2006, the World Wide Web became a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. The cover story's lead author Lev Grossman then starts off with some fairly inspired prose after noting that there are still serious problems in the word which aregrowing in conjunction with this apparent technological Utopia, writing:

But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

The cynical among us will find some of Lev's analysis to be starry-eyed and excessively optimistic, but calling out Web 2.0 by name, the Person of the Year cover story makes careful note that the mass participation we're witnessing on a grand scale on the Internet cuts both ways:

Sure, it's a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.

But the lead story is just the beginning and Time has prepared an extravaganza of supporting material and documention in the form of fourteen separate stories that range across the Web 2.0 terrain covering subjects from online virtual worlds such as Second Life to an article titled in near purple prose fashion: "The Beast With a Billion Eyes - On the Web, anyone with a digital camera has the power to change history."

None of this however is likely to please most of us who have lived through the year of Web 2.0, as 2006 undoubtedly was its big break with the term making the covers of major media properties like Newsweek and The Economist . In terms of the blogosphere, the self-appointed contributors that are making some of this this happen, the commentary on Time's choice covered the spectrum: Jeff Jarvis agreed with most of what they wrote, just requested that they turn down the volume a bit. Nick Carr took it surprisingly easy on the article, though he's long since posted his opinions of the Web 2.0 phenomenon. Paul Kedrosky came in as one of harshest critics of the story series and accused it of being a blatent cop-out, what with more important issues existing elsewhere in the world needing to be highlighted. With this altter bit I would suggest that the printing press didn't get much credit at the time but it's impact was practically profound and beneficial when looking back several hundred years.

In reality, the Web as it exists today with sites like MySpace and YouTube which eagerly offer anyone who wants it an essentially permanent, scalable "channel" of their very own on the Internet, makes it possible for anyone with great -- or at least interesting -- ideas to reach the over 1 billion users that presently comprise the Web. Never before in history has access to the largest audience of users in the world been essentially free other than the personal time it takes to contribute. The long-term of effects of this will no doubt be as unpredictable as they will be significant as the control over information and content becomes relentlessly decentralized. The Web is essentially a system without an owner, a platform that is under no one's control, though anyone is free to built a new platform on top of that. Companies have had varying success in doing just that but the design patterns and business models for making the Web work best are at least beginning to be understood (aka Web 2.0). But in the end, control is shifting to the edge of the Internet instead of the center and it's not likely to shift direction without extremely potent motivation.

The aftershocks of all this (the shift of control, pervasive ability of anyone to trigger inflection points, etc) have sometimes been called Social Computing, and it will be long in unfolding. Companies and organizations that continually hand over more non-essential control to their employees, customers, and suppliers will almost certain be the big winners here. We have plenty of examples to cite already. The sudden pervasiveness of the two-way, participatory sites and tools powered by network effects and feedback loops have quickly remade the online landscape and Time has decided it is as big an event at least as it famously did in the 1980s by making the personal computer Person of the Year. I would wager however, the Web 2.0 is probably a more significant event by a good margin that even the PC was. Although the precise definition of Web 2.0 continues to evolve, the fundamental effect, the harnessing of collective intelligence is the one that has the genuine potential to fundamentally remake our cultures, societies, businesses and even, as Lev Grossman states, "change the way we change the world.

In any case, as usual, like the term or not, the Web is putting you in charge of just about anything that you can imagine. I recently spoke to a major fashion industry CEO who said he would expect to have product lines that were designed entirely by user contribution and the best resulting submissions selected by their customers to be that year's product line. The lesson: The consumers have become the producers. The same with just about any line of business; turning over non-essential control can result in enormous gains in economic efficiency as tens of thousands or even millions of customers creative output is harnessed in a mutually beneficial way. Organizations that fail to embrace the Web's natural communication-oriented strengths will fail when put in competition that those that do. Thus, a fascinating chain of events is forming as people around the world begin to realize the true significance of what the Web 2.0 era can truly offer. What will you do?

What do you think? Is Web 2.0 evolution or revolution? Why?

Profitably Running an Online Business in the Web 2.0 Era

Dion Hinchcliffe — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 01:48:00 GMT

One of the things I'm doing this week is preparing for a presentation at Web Builder 2.0 on how to monetize mashups in Las Vegas next week. Consequently, I've been pulling together notes, talking to mashup creators, and studying real-world examples of how companies are applying innovative ways of generating revenue with Web 2.0 applications and open APIs. Though there are all sorts of interesting emerging stories, such as the new Second Life millionaire, product developers are increasingly trying to explore the options beyond the obvious: namely big value acquisitions ala YouTube or the often fickle, if mostly workable, online advertising route. But the biggest question that comes up is that if you let your users generate most of your content and then expose it all up via an API, how can a profitable business be made from this?

This has been the question from the outset, and though you can build enormously successful sites in terms of numbers of users and amounts of content using Web 2.0 techniques, the best means of monetizing this remain a larger unproven endeavor. I wrote a while back on the struggle to monetize Web 2.0 where I explored in detail the strategic and tactical methods for making next generation Web sites financially viable, even successful.

If you refer to my original article on monetizing Web 2.0, I identified three tactical means for generating revenue (advertising, subscriptions, and commissions) and a series of strategies that can support them. While it's usually fairly clear how the direct revenue models work, it's usually less clear to people how the indirect strategies can directly influence the opportunities.

Strategies for Making the Most from Web 2.0

There are direct (the 3 items above) and numerous indirect ways to monetize Web 2.0 that often go unappreciated
Some of the indirect ways which lead to revenue growth, user growth, and increased resistance to competition -- which in turn lead to increased subscriptions, advertising, and commission revenue -- are:

Strategic Acquisition: Identifying and acquiring Web 2.0 companies on the exponential growth curve before the rest of the market realizes what it's worth (early exploitation of someone else's network effects.)
Maintaining control of hard to recreate data sources. This is basically turning walled gardens into fenced gardens: Let users access everything, but not let them keep it, such as Google providing access to their search index only over the Web.
Building Attention Trust - By being patently fair with customer data and leveraging user's loyalty, you can get them to share more information about themselves that in turns leads to much better products and services tailored to them.
Turning Applications into Platforms: One single use of an application is simply a waste of software. Turn applications into platforms and get 5, 50, or 5,000 additional uses (Amazon has over 50,000 users of its line of business APIs) for example. Online platforms are actually very easy to monetize but having compelling content or services first is a prerequisite.
Fully Automated Online Customer Self-Service: Let users get what they want, when they want it, without help. Seems easy but almost all companies have people in the loop to manage the edge-cases. Unfortunately, edge cases represent the The Long Tail of customer service. This is hard but in the end provides goods and services with much tighter feedback loops. And it's also a mandatory prerequisite for cost effectively serving mass micromarkets. In other words, you can't directly monetize The Long Tail without this.

Lying directly in the primary tenets of Web 2.0 however, are a series of two-edged issues from a revenue perspective. Though the concepts and ideas are powerful when applied appropriately, they can also pose significant short-term and long-term challenges. Below are the basic principles of Web 2.0 along with the positive and negative revenue implications for most companies on the Web today, even ones that aren't fully embracing it yet.

Revenue Implications for Web 2.0 Principles (not meant to be exhaustive)

Principle 1: Web as Platform

Upside: Revenue scalability (1 billion users on the Web), rapid growth potential and reach through exploitation of network effects
Downside: Competition is only a URL away, often requiring significant investment in differentiation

Principle 2: Software Above a Single Device

Upside: More opportunities to deliver products and services to users in more situations
Downside: Upfront costs, more infrastructure, more development/testing/support (costs) to deliver products across multiple devices

Principle 3: Data is the Next "Intel Inside"

Upside: Customer loyalty and even lock-in
Downside: Lack of competitive pressure leading to complacency, long-term potential antitrust issues

Principle 4: Lightweight Programming & Business Models

Upside: Dramatically reduced production costs, easier integration with partners, suppliers, faster product cycles or more features
Downside: Unexpected scalability demands, unpredictable capacity, potential security issues, lack of control

Principle 5: Rich User Experiences

Upside: More productive and satisfied users, competitive advantage
Downside: Higher cost of development, potentially lower new user discoverability and adoption

Principle 6: Harnessing Collective Intelligence

Upside: Much lower costs of production, higher rate of innovation, dramatically larger overall content output
Downside: Lower level of direct control, governance issues (increased dependence on user base), content management issues, and legal exposure over IP

Principle 7: Leveraging The Long Tail

Upside: Cost-effectively reach thousands of small, previously unprofitable market segments resulting in overall customer growth
Downside: Upfront investment costs can be very significant, managing costs of customer service long-term

While a great many startups are not generating revenue in huge quantities yet, the companies that have been diligently exploiting open APIs such as Amazon and Salesforce are in fact generating significant revenue and second order effects from opening up their platforms and being careful not to lose control. This is actually a large discussion, and as large Web 2.0 sites continue to emerge, we'll continue to keep track of what the successful patterns and practices are.

What other implications are there by putting users in control of content generation and opening everything up?

Going Beyond User Generated Software: Web 2.0 and the Pragmatic Semantic Web

Dion Hinchcliffe — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 19:09:00 GMT

I was traveling most of last week and so was unable to weigh in on the Web 3.0 mini-tempest that occurred when John Markoff published his exploratory piece in the NY Times last Sunday. The premise of the article is that we are finding new ways to mine human intelligence which can be exploited by building a new layer of "meaning" on top of the accumulating mass of global collective intelligence that is growing by leaps and bounds every day on the Internet. Collective intelligence of course is one key aspects of Web 2.0, namely an Internet that is continually improved by constant and sustained contact with hundreds of millions of users contributing content. These users can either contribute explicitly via a conscious act or implicitly by their very interaction with the Web which then leaves behind useful behavioral "tracks" that can be fed back into the system. In this ways, hundreds of millions of people are adding to what we know every day, even if individuals contributions are often minor.

Markoff's description of Web 3.0 was ostensibly prompted by something I'm seeing as well, well beyond pure play Web mashups we're beginning to witness a number of companies building end-user solutions that can automatically navigate the Internet, weave together tapestries of online information to generate new, useful results. They can even take it a step beyond: dynamically generated situational Web applications that fully interact with the Web ecosystem. Such applications -- self-assembled by these tools -- can perform useful tasks such as planning vacations, managing personal schedules, or even orchestrating complex, collaborative business processes for example including entire real-world projects. The vision is stunning and futuristic yet and the rich fabric of the Web today, with hundreds of open APIs and even vaster reservoirs of content and raw data, now opens the door to the possibility.

Background Reading: Take a look at eight end-user mashup platforms available today

I've written a lot recently about the trend of user generated software, applications developed by end-users that use the openness of the Web 2.0 era to interact with high value Web services. But already we're beginning to see the emergence of the next step beyond that: applications developed and tasks completed intelligently by software itself. Tim-Berners Lee himself envisioned this as the coming Semantic Web which he brilliantly espoused in Scientific American a few years back and has been the goal of great many companies ever since, but which has been relatively unsuccessful on a large scale even up until now. The reasons for this are complex but seem to lie in what we learned from Web 1.0; a priori solutions often aren't the right ones, emergent ones are .

So while many might say that the 1,200+ mashups currently listed in the trend graphs on Programmable Web are mostly NOT user generated, one only has to look at the widespread use of badges and widgets on MySpace and other major social networking sites to see that everyday people are getting more and more comfortable with "turfing" their blogs and spaces with content, code, and feeds from elsewhere on the Web. So while much of the end-user mashup activity we see today is probably shallow and don't represent sophisticated functionality, the new tools we're seeing every day are getting better and better and allowing users to take it deeper, creating a true mashup ecosystem.

The shortage of developers and application backlogs: Not finding the app you need

Here's an significant fact, if you look at the number of professional software developers out there today, they are dwarfed by the number of end-users with the time and motivation to describe the solutions that they need. And interestingly, the same population is dwarfed by the potential output of computer systems that can be directed to create the applications or carry out the tasks we need, with minimal continuous attention on our part.

If you only look at the enterprise IT space you will see that users usually have a long list of things for which they'd like software solutions, but can't get satisfied by the traditional purchase or build processes in place in most organizations. Every CIO out there is painfully aware of this application backlog but hasn't had the tools to address it. And out on the Web, there's a different problem: Lots of Web sites, but little software that will do the specific things that a users needs to get accomplished. As Steve Borch says , "sit back, relax, and let your customers create your products."

Like IBM is realizing with their exploration of end-user driven development products like QEDWiki, most of us today are already conducting much, if not most, of our software integration manually, by re-entering or cutting and pasting data endlessly between our applications. This implies that 1) there's demand but not enough access to software that does exactly what people want and 2) there is a very low level of integration between the dozens of pieces of software that we currently use on a daily basis.

And in fact, there really is at least two ways for Semantic Web technologies (and its myriad offshoots, many of them proprietary) to improve the way that we use the Internet. The first is in fact to provide that "layer" of meaning; making the underlying intent services and content to be made clear to programs and not just developers. And the second is to actively exploit that layer; building software or carrying out processes intelligently on the behalf of users.

Traditional software isn't adaptable enough: Mashups and Semantic Web Apps are a better way to do things on the fly

Need a piece of software to manage the process of planning a wedding and its long list of attendees, suppliers, and dependencies? How about something to coordinate the delivery of construction materials to a job site for the least total cost including materials and shipping, just in time and in the correct order as the items on the construction schedule are completed? The possibilities in the consumer and business worlds both are truly endless and reflect that such software can at long lat perhaps fill The Long Tail of IT software demand , which could never cost effectively serve the thousands of mass customized applications that would potentially make using software a dream instead of the chore that it often becomes due to the fact that processes and not just data is what needs to be managed.

And while this -- and by "this" I mean recombinant, self-assembling software that exploits collective intelligence -- is certainly the cutting edge of software development, many companies are beginning to map out this terrain closely and I encourage you to begin tracking them along with me. Startups and initiatives such as JackBe, Teqlo, OpenKapow, Itensil and a great many others are either wholly or partially enabling the automation of software creation and process management. Interesting, they are usually not via true Semantic Web technology, but by virtue of open, simple, easy-to-describe-and-consume services of the Web 2.0 generation .

This brings us to my last point. In a panel earlier this year with Adam Bosworth and other notably Web lumuniaries, I responded to an audience question about the difference between Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web by saying "Web 2.0 is what happened while we were waiting for the Semantic Web." And that highlights an interesting point, that this latest generation of tools appears to be built on simple yet proprietary approaches and not on the open but formal Semantic Web technologies. Whether this points to underlying issue with the usability of Semantic Web 1.0 is hard to say but RSS 1.0 ran into the same issue. Thus I call this next generation of approaches the "Pragmatic Semantic Web." But I am a bit concerned about the lack of standards and this will be something to watch as we see if this next generation of online software is truly ready to sprout wings and fly.

What other Web 3.0/Pragmatic Semantic Web companies or projects do you know about?