dan mcquillan's List: introduction to social media IS51020A - lecture 1- web 2.0 & social media

• The concept of "Web 2.0" began with a conference brainstorming session between O'Reilly and MediaLive International. Dale Dougherty, web pioneer and O'Reilly VP, noted that far from having "crashed", the web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity. What's more, the companies that had survived the collapse seemed to have some things in common. Could it be that the dot-com collapse marked some kind of turning point for the web, such that a call to action such as "Web 2.0" might make sense?

• In our initial brainstorming, we formulated our sense of Web 2.0 by example:

                                

  Web 1.0		Web 2.0
  DoubleClick	-->	Google AdSense
  Ofoto	-->	Flickr
  Akamai	-->	BitTorrent
• The Web As Platform

• Much like the "horseless carriage" framed the automobile as an extension of the familiar, Netscape promoted a "webtop" to replace the desktop, and planned to populate that webtop with information updates and applets pushed to the webtop by information providers who would purchase Netscape servers.

    

  In the end, both web browsers and web servers turned out to be commodities, and value moved "up the stack" to services delivered over the web platform.
• Google, by contrast, began its life as a native web application, never sold or packaged, but delivered as a service, with customers paying, directly or indirectly, for the use of that service. None of the trappings of the old software industry are present. No scheduled software releases, just continuous improvement. No licensing or sale, just usage. No porting to different platforms so that customers can run the software on their own equipment, just a massively scalable collection of commodity PCs running open source operating systems plus homegrown applications and utilities that no one outside the company ever gets to see.
• At bottom, Google requires a competency that Netscape never needed: database management. Google isn't just a collection of software tools, it's a specialized database.
• Software licensing and control over APIs--the lever of power in the previous era--is irrelevant because the software never need be distributed but only performed,
• The Web 2.0 lesson: leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head.
• BitTorrent thus demonstrates a key Web 2.0 principle: the service automatically gets better the more people use it.
• Harnessing Collective Intelligence
• The lesson: Network effects from user contributions are the key to market dominance in the Web 2.0 era.
• Blogging and the Wisdom of Crowds
• Now, of course, "dynamic websites" (i.e., database-backed sites with dynamically generated content) replaced static web pages well over ten years ago. What's dynamic about the live web are not just the pages, but the links. A link to a weblog is expected to point to a perennially changing page, with "permalinks" for any individual entry, and notification for each change. An RSS feed is thus a much stronger link than, say a bookmark or a link to a single page.
• RSS also means that the web browser is not the only means of viewing a web page.

• Tom Coates remarks on the significance of the permalink:

    

  It may seem like a trivial piece of functionality now, but it was effectively the device that turned weblogs from an ease-of-publishing phenomenon into a conversational mess of overlapping communities. For the first time it became relatively easy to gesture directly at a highly specific post on someone else's site and talk about it. Discussion emerged. Chat emerged. And - as a result - friendships emerged or became more entrenched.
• In many ways, the combination of RSS and permalinks adds many of the features of NNTP, the Network News Protocol of the Usenet, onto HTTP, the web protocol.
• Interestingly, two-way links were the goal of early hypertext systems like Xanadu.
• Social networking systems like Friendster, Orkut, and LinkedIn, which require acknowledgment by the recipient in order to establish a connection, lack the same scalability as the web.
• If an essential part of Web 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence, turning the web into a kind of global brain, the blogosphere is the equivalent of constant mental chatter in the forebrain, the voice we hear in all of our heads. It may not reflect the deep structure of the brain, which is often unconscious, but is instead the equivalent of conscious thought. And as a reflection of conscious thought and attention, the blogosphere has begun to have a powerful effect.
• If it were merely an amplifier, blogging would be uninteresting. But like Wikipedia, blogging harnesses collective intelligence as a kind of filter. What James Suriowecki calls "the wisdom of crowds" comes into play, and much as PageRank produces better results than analysis of any individual document, the collective attention of the blogosphere selects for value.
• 3. Data is the Next Intel Inside
• This fact leads to a key question: Who owns the data?
• Contrast, however, the position of Amazon.com. Like competitors such as Barnesandnoble.com, its original database came from ISBN registry provider R.R. Bowker. But unlike MapQuest, Amazon relentlessly enhanced the data, adding publisher-supplied data such as cover images, table of contents, index, and sample material. Even more importantly, they harnessed their users to annotate the data, such that after ten years, Amazon, not Bowker, is the primary source for bibliographic data on books, a reference source for scholars and librarians as well as consumers. Amazon also introduced their own proprietary identifier, the ASIN, which corresponds to the ISBN where one is present, and creates an equivalent namespace for products without one. Effectively, Amazon "embraced and extended" their data suppliers.

• Paul Rademacher's housingmaps.com, which combines Google Maps with Craigslist apartment rental and home purchase data to create an interactive housing search tool, is the pre-eminent example of such a mashup.

    

  At present, these mashups are mostly innovative experiments, done by hackers. But entrepreneurial activity follows close behind.
• Much as the rise of proprietary software led to the Free Software movement, we expect the rise of proprietary databases to result in a Free Data movement within the next decade. One can see early signs of this countervailing trend in open data projects such as Wikipedia, the Creative Commons, and in software projects like Greasemonkey, which allow users to take control of how data is displayed on their computer.
• 4. End of the Software Release Cycle
• Operations must become a core competency.
• It's no accident that Google's system administration, networking, and load balancing techniques are perhaps even more closely guarded secrets than their search algorithms. Google's success at automating these processes is a key part of their cost advantage over competitors.
• It's also no accident that scripting languages such as Perl, Python, PHP, and now Ruby, play such a large role at web 2.0 companies. Perl was famously described by Hassan Schroeder, Sun's first webmaster, as "the duct tape of the internet." Dynamic languages (often called scripting languages and looked down on by the software engineers of the era of software artifacts) are the tool of choice for system and network administrators, as well as application developers building dynamic systems that require constant change.
• Users must be treated as co-developers, in a reflection of open source development practices (even if the software in question is unlikely to be released under an open source license.) The open source dictum, "release early and release often" in fact has morphed into an even more radical position, "the perpetual beta," in which the product is developed in the open, with new features slipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis. It's no accident that services such as Gmail, Google Maps, Flickr, del.icio.us, and the like may be expected to bear a "Beta" logo for years at a time.
• 5. Lightweight Programming Models
• But much as the web succeeded precisely because it overthrew much of hypertext theory, substituting a simple pragmatism for ideal design, RSS has become perhaps the single most widely deployed web service because of its simplicity, while the complex corporate web services stacks have yet to achieve wide deployment.
• Google Maps' simple AJAX (Javascript and XML) interface was quickly decrypted by hackers, who then proceeded to remix the data into new services.
• Support lightweight programming models that allow for loosely coupled systems. The complexity of the corporate-sponsored web services stack is designed to enable tight coupling. While this is necessary in many cases, many of the most interesting applications can indeed remain loosely coupled, and even fragile. The Web 2.0 mindset is very different from the traditional IT mindset!
• Think syndication, not coordination. Simple web services, like RSS and REST-based web services, are about syndicating data outwards, not controlling what happens when it gets to the other end of the connection. This idea is fundamental to the internet itself, a reflection of what is known as the end-to-end principle
• Design for "hackability" and remixability. Systems like the original web, RSS, and AJAX all have this in common: the barriers to re-use are extremely low.
• Innovation in Assembly
• Lightweight business models are a natural concomitant of lightweight programming and lightweight connections. The Web 2.0 mindset is good at re-use. A new service like housingmaps.com was built simply by snapping together two existing services.
• Much as the PC revolution provided many opportunities for innovation in assembly of commodity hardware, with companies like Dell making a science out of such assembly, thereby defeating companies whose business model required innovation in product development, we believe that Web 2.0 will provide opportunities for companies to beat the competition by getting better at harnessing and integrating services provided by others.
• 6. Software Above the Level of a Single Device

• Of course, any web application can be seen as software above the level of a single device. After all, even the simplest web application involves at least two computers: the one hosting the web server and the one hosting the browser. And as we've discussed, the development of the web as platform extends this idea to synthetic applications composed of services provided by multiple computers.

    

  But as with many areas of Web 2.0, where the "2.0-ness" is not something new, but rather a fuller realization of the true potential of the web platform, this phrase gives us a key insight into how to design applications and services for the new platform.

• To date, iTunes is the best exemplar of this principle. This application seamlessly reaches from the handheld device to a massive web back-end, with the PC acting as a local cache and control station. There have been many previous attempts to bring web content to portable devices, but the iPod/iTunes combination is one of the first such applications designed from the ground up to span multiple devices. TiVo is another good example.

    

  iTunes and TiVo also demonstrate many of the other core principles of Web 2.0. They are not web applications per se, but they leverage the power of the web platform, making it a seamless, almost invisible part of their infrastructure. Data management is most clearly the heart of their offering. They are services, not packaged applications
• 7. Rich User Experiences

• However, the potential of the web to deliver full scale applications didn't hit the mainstream till Google introduced Gmail, quickly followed by Google Maps, web based applications with rich user interfaces and PC-equivalent interactivity. The collection of technologies used by Google was christened AJAX, in a seminal essay by Jesse James Garrett of web design firm Adaptive Path. He wrote:

    

   

  "Ajax isn't a technology. It's really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways. Ajax incorporates:

    

   
  • standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS;
    
  • dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;
    
  • data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
    
  • asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;
    
  • and JavaScript binding everything together."
• Interestingly, many of the capabilities now being explored have been around for many years.

• Core Competencies of Web 2.0 Companies

    

  In exploring the seven principles above, we've highlighted some of the principal features of Web 2.0. Each of the examples we've explored demonstrates one or more of those key principles, but may miss others. Let's close, therefore, by summarizing what we believe to be the core competencies of Web 2.0 companies:

    
   
  • Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
    
  • Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
    
  • Trusting users as co-developers
    
  • Harnessing collective intelligence
    
  • Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
    
  • Software above the level of a single device
    
  • Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models
   
    

  The next time a company claims that it's "Web 2.0," test their features against the list above. The more points they score, the more they are worthy of the name. Remember, though, that excellence in one area may be more telling than some small steps in all seven.

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• We need to look at the whole society and think, "Are we actually thinking about what we're doing as we go forward, and are we preserving the really important values that we have in society? Are we keeping it democratic, and open, and so on?"

• this was the evolution of our process for creating the standards, it started off fairly ad hoc, much more in the start of the Internet engineering task force. People get together, they know each other -- and all with a passion for the same thing -- get together and produce some technology and roll it out and then sort of create a new market.

   

  Then we found with one particular standard that came through the consortium, that one of the people in the working group turned around and said, "Oh, right -- you're all going to be paying me royalties, by the way, when we're finished." And there was shock and horror. This was during the dot -com boom, so this was when things were moving very fast, people were talking about 2.6 Internet years being a year -- or was it an Internet year being 2.6 months? -- things going very fast. And the whole process stopped for 18 months. It cost us I think $150,000 to find a lawyer who would investigate it and write an opinion. And the opinion was that actually these people would not be paying anybody royalties, that a patent did not apply in that case.
• So my function was that everybody would be able to edit in this space, or different people would have access rights to different spaces. But I really wanted it to be a collaborative authoring tool

• But I've always felt frustrated that most people don't ... didn't have write access. And wikis and blogs are two areas where suddenly two sort of genres of online information suddenly allow people to edit, and they're very widely picked up, and people are very excited about them.

   

  And I think that really for me reinforces the idea that people need to be creative. They want to be able to record what they think. They want to be able to, if they see something wrong go and fix it.

• You know, with Web 2.0, a common explanation out there is Web 1.0 was about connecting computers and making information available; and Web 2 is about connecting people and facilitating new kinds of collaboration. Is that how you see Web 2.0?

   

    Berners-Lee: Totally not. Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is, of course, a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along. And in fact, you know, this Web 2.0, quote, it means using the standards which have been produced by all these people working on Web 1.0. It means using the document object model, it means for HTML and SVG, and so on. It's using HTTP, so it's building stuff using the Web standards, plus JavaScript, of course. So Web 2.0, for some people, it means moving some of the thinking client side so making it more immediate, but the idea of the Web as interaction between people is really what the Web is. That was what it was designed to be as a collaborative space where people can interact.

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