The Web 2.0 Zeitgeist, 2006 Edition
The Web 2.0 Zeitgeist, 2006 Edition
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. 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. 
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.
All We Got Was Web 1.0, When Tim Berners-Lee Actually Gave Us Web 2.0
The blogosphere flew into its usual uproar a few days ago when the inventor of the World Wide Web himself, the venerated Tim Berners-Lee, was recently recorded in a podcast calling Web 2.0 nothing more than a piece of jargon. There is little love and plenty of misunderstanding for this term in many quarters of the industry, despite the fact it has been painstakingly described by those that identified it to the world. For all the folks tired of hearing about Web 2.0 and very often not knowing what it means, there nevertheless remains the underlying reason for coining it: clearly apparent, widespread new trends in the way the Web is being used.
Of all the analysis I’ve read of the Berners-Lee podcast (and there’s a bunch, read Dana Gardner, John Furrier, even Dead 2.0), it’s Jeremy Geelan who has captured the real insight here with his post, “The Perfect Storm of Web 2.0 Disruption“, where he brilliantly explains what is probably the key to the real significance of the Web 2.0 phenomenon as a portentous crossroads between the old and the new:
Web 2.0 is an example of what the historian Daniel Boorstin would have called “the Fertile Verge” - “a place of encounter between something and something else.” Boorstin (and here I am wholly indebted to Virginia Postrel) pinpointed such “verges” as being nothing short of the secret to American creativity.
Postrel sums up what Boorstin was saying as follows:
“A verge is not a sharp border but a frontier region: where the forest meets the prairie or the mountains meet the flatlands, where ecosystems or ideas mingle. Verges between land and sea, between civilization and wilderness, between black and white, between immigrants and natives…between state and national governments, between city and countryside - all mark the American experience.”– Jeremy Geelan
Web 2.0 Is Much More About A Change In People and Society Than Technology
But is Web 2.0 really about the Web, or us? The rise of architectures of participation, which make it easy for users to contribute content, share it – and then let other users easily discover and enrich it, is central to Web 2.0 sites like MySpace, YouTube, Digg, and Flickr. But this is still just another aspect in the way that we, ourselves, have changed the way we use the Web. Not only have we gained 950 million new Internet users in the last ten years, but a great many of them use the Internet differently now too, with a hundred million of them or more directly shaping the Web by building their own places on the Web with blogs and “spaces”, or by contributing content of virtually infinite variety.
Let’s not forget that there were important issues that really held back the early Web and prevented the widespread flourishing of the collaboration and connecting of people that Tim Berners-Lee originally intended. This included privacy concerns, almost entirely one-way Web sites, lack of skills using the Internet, and even slow connections. But these have now continued to drop away rapidly in recent years, with many younger people in particular not hindered by these issues at all (rightly or wrongly.)
And for sure, let’s not forget that the Web has changed over the years. There have been countless technological refinements and even improvements to the physics of the Internet itself. These range from the adoption of broadband, improved browsers, and Ajax, to the rise of Flash application platforms and the mass development of widgetization such as Flickr and YouTube badges. But the trend to watch is the change in the behavior of people on the Internet. Because much of this Web 2.0 phenomenon comes from mass innovation flowing in from the edge of our networks; that’s millions of people blogging, hundreds of thousands more producing video and audio, hundreds of Web 2.0 startups creating hugely addictive social experiences, sites that aggregate all the contributed content that one billion Internet users can create and more.
Yes, the original vision of Berners-Lee is now apparently happening, so he’s right in a sense there while glossing over the reality of the early Web. But though his vision was largely possible since the advent of the first forms-capable browser, at first we only got what we could call “Web 1.0″; simple Web sites that were largely read-only or at least would only take your credit card. The essential draw of mountains of valuable user generated content just wasn’t there. And the millions of people with the skills and attitudes weren’t there either. Even the techniques for making good emergent, self-organizing communities and two-way software were in their very infancy or were misunderstood. An example: How long did it take the lowly editable Web page (aka wikis) to be popular and widespread? Nearly a decade. The fact is, most of us know that innovation is all too likely to race ahead of where society is. I run into folks from Web 1.0 startups fairly often that bitterly complain about how they were building Web 2.0 software in 2000, but nobody came.
What Exactly Is Special About The Web 2.0 Era?
I write frequently that we as an industry rediscover over and over again the same classic design issues right at the juncture of people and software, just repackaged enough so we don’t recognize them until it’s too late. This time around the sheer numbers and scale of the Internet have distorted our traditional, more parochial views of what we thought networked software was and online communities were. One outcome is the illusion that we had large degree of control over what happens when large groups of networked people can join together collaborate and innovate. We don’t. It’s like a large door has been opened behind us and everyone is now just getting a sense of that it’s there and where it leads.
But what exact is new here? I mentioned a few things, but a more complete list is better:
- There are over a billion Internet users now. Network effects can quickly climb in even small corners of the Internet, since small can now mean just a hundred thousand users.
- Many of these users have become profoundly Web-fluent. Robert Scoble observed recently that many users are still casual and non-expert, but almost all can search, they can post, they can edit a Wiki, and a lot of of them are now comfortable cutting and pasting Javascript snippets, and frequently much more. They are in control of the vehicle now.
- Powerful practices in Web site design are becoming widely known. The best and often most successful sites are finding out that carefully designing what Tim O’Reilly calls harnessing collective intelligence deep into the design of their sites can provide truly amazing results. And this aspect of how we use the Web is actually far behind the first two trends. It’s still surprising to me that many people cite Ajax as the exemplar of Web 2.0 and not building networked applications that leverage user contributions and trigger network effects. There’s quite a bit of headroom here in fact, and I expect to continue to see compelling advances in Web 2.0 software design.
- Thus, power and control is shifting to the new creators. As the users of the Web produce the vast majority of content (and soon, even software), they are therefore in control of it. This shift of control has enormous long-term consequences since the Internet tends to route right around whatever central controls try to be applied. The implications for traditional organizations are fascinating and will only increase as the MySpace generation heads into the workplace in large numbers.
There are more secondary trends related to Web 2.0 but the first three are the key, without all three, I would assert we would not be seeing some of the truly amazing things out on the Web that we see today. Is all of this “frothy”, as Robert Scoble recently claimed. Not in the slightest. Are people excited about it? Yes, and they should be. And while I don’t find the term itself to be particularly important — it’s the ideas behind it that are so interesting — the fact that so many people feel so strongy about the term Web 2.0 tells us that it’s something we should understand better.
BTW, in that last link Scoble was talking about The New New Internet, a Washington DC-based Web 2.0 conference I’m involved in. I can assure you it’ll be as far from content free as you can get and I do hope to see you there.
Attention security experts: BlueLane protects your virtual machines
Allwyn Sequeira, senior VP of product operations at Bluelane, tells me about his company’s new Virtual Shield, which protects enterprises against virtual machine attacks.
Tags: Allwyn Sequeira, Bluelane, Virtual Shield
Lanetro Zed symposium and Peter Cochrane ..
Last Friday, I spoke at the Zed symposium organized by Lanetro Zed
at Sotogrande in Spain
Besides me, the other speaker in the morning was Professor Peter Cochrane. Peter is a legend in the industry and it was great to meet him for the first time. Also, we discovered that our presentations had remarkably similar themes and messages although independently created ? which was very flattering to know
I learnt a lot in the day. The focus of my talk was on Web 2.0, Mobile Web 2.0 and User generated content.
Peter Cochrane talked about the future ? but some of what he talked of ? was reflected in my talk as well (which pertained to the present). I was followed by Mr Javier Perez (La Netro Zed cofounder) ? who talked about the implementation (i.e. how Zed was incorporating these ideas into their product set). And finally, in the afternoon, various Operators and key industry players talked about how they are actually changing (for instance flat rate seems to be coming in many regions).
Thus, I was left with the thought that much of the future is here and now and we have many new and interesting services to look forward to
Many thanks to Ana, Maria and Eduardo for the flawless organization and to Mr Perez and Zed for inviting me over. The lovely Ana especially seemed to defy the laws of physics by being in more than one place at once!
I was especially impressed by Peter?s talk. It was great to meet Peter and his charming wife Jane. Peter was head of Research and CTO at BT and Peter’s PhD was pivotal in BT deciding to go all-digital and all-optical in the 1970’s
There are many things I could pick up ? even with casual conversation ? for instance: at lunch ? someone asked ?What would be Peter?s advice to Telcos? ? (considering he said in his talk that very few would survive in the next few years in their current form)
I think his answer was: As the mobile network mirrors the Internet (and by extension ? value shifts to the edge as opposed to the core), the Operator can survive only by leveraging what is in the core (and ONLY in the core). This means (in my view) ? Identity, Payment, Location, Customer profiles.
Its little things like that ..
In the presentation itself, there were many cool things for instance 405 the movie - which is the most viewed movie ever I believe.
However, the historical perspective of industries in transformation was even more interesting for me. For example: Supermarkets went through a dropping profit margins (22%, 16%, 8% and ultimately to as low as 2%). Operators may also go through the same ? hence the consolidation and the need to rethink the business model.
I look forward to meeting Peter again soon ..
I will also be following Zed more closely. Much of their new strategy is very consistent with Mobile Web 2.0 - and it is great to see content players evolve in the new world of User Generated Content