Posts tagged as: web2

Web 2.0 conference in Dublin

I've been invited to speak at the Web 2.0 in Ireland conference in Dublin on April 27th. This would be my first actual speaking engagement in the computer industry since some time in 1992. During Web 1.0 I didn't go to any conferences. Who needed to actually be in a room with other people when we had the Internet? It should be fun. I've never been to Dublin for some reason, so I'm looking forward to that as well. My original plan was to go to Limerick at the end of April to visit James Corbett, but he was nice enough to arrange this invite through the event organizer, Fergus Burns. Isn't that a grand name? Too bad I can't roll my R's. Anyway, James will be flying into Dublin instead, so I get to see what the Irish tech revolution is all about and hang out with James as well. After the conference I'll be hopping over to Amsterdam for a little vacation. Now that is a city I am familiar with. James wanted to know what was in Amsterdam. Silly man. What isn't in Amsterdam?

A CTO's guide to Web 2.0

A couple of days ago I had breakfast with a former Chief Technology Officer of a REALLY big telco. He had attended the RSS Alley Geek Dinner the night before, and I could tell that even though he was one generation ahead of me, we had a similar take on software and computer technology. He was in Boston to have meetings with various people as a way of learning more about Web 2.0, so I volunteered to get together with him the next day to share my definition from a fellow CTO's perspective. I won't give his real name, because I didn't ask his permission, and this post isn't really about him. It is more about what any CTO needs to consider when trying to run a software development effort in the current Internet environment. For the purpose of this essay, I'll call him Jack.

The funny thing is that Jack's previous company had about 4,000 times more employees and sales than my company, yet we had exactly the same concerns about the new philosophy of development and business surrounding Web products. The insane thing is that Jack's company was valued at only 100 times that of my company when we got acquired, but that was the craziness of February, 2000.

I talked to Jack about four broad areas of change that any CTO needed to think about, but they all came down to one basic issue, a lack of control. It isn't that CTO's have to be control freaks, although they should be. It is a CTO's job to think ahead to what can go wrong, and try to make sure those blocks don't interfere with whatever technology tasks the company needs to accomplish. In a way, a CTO is like the lawyer for a company's technology, always looking for pitfalls well before they are reached. Web 2.0 forces a company to adopt the one thing any good CTO should loath, dependencies. You have to allow your company to be dependent on other people's code, their voices, their data, and their personal motivations that can't necessarily be overridden by money. Let me go through each of these dependencies:

• Open Source. While much of Web 1.0 was built using Linux, Apache, Sendmail, and languages such as Perl and PHP, the philosophy of Open Source didn't become pervasive until the turn of the century. There are now Open Source components throughout a typical Web 2.0 application. For example, collective voting has applications in many areas beyond the traditional uses in sites like Digg.com or Reddit.com, and is now available through the Pligg software, which is Open Source. Other common Open Source components are found in blogging tools and wikis. Companies also have to consider the desire of their programmers to release their work for the company as Open Source. While this has obvious implications for intellectual property, it also creates a labor force of more productive programmers, because they can bring portions of their code with them when they change jobs.
  
  Jack was understandably concerned about quality control when using code that isn't delivered and supported by a commercial vendor, but the benefits of a larger and more open community of users can deliver a more robust solution than one used by a few hundred or even thousands of commercial customers. Building with Open Source code also means faster development cycles, so instead of working for years and trying to deliver a perfectly specified and tested system, a more incremental approach based on existing components allows you to work towards a solution in an evolutionary fashion. The reality is that a project that takes several years to reach "perfection" has so much invested in it that it may be impossible to stop and rebuild when problems are discovered, so they are just built over with ever increasing layers of patches. In the long run, a CTO using Open Source code does have to reject the traditional Not Invented Here syndrome, and accept a greater dependence on other people's code. The trade off in shorter development cycles is worth it in my opinion.
• Blogs. Web 2.0 also brings about a shift in the way a company's technology efforts are communicated to the outside world. Instead of thinking in terms of versions that are announced at long intervals through a traditional PR campaign, the use of corporate blogs helps customers stay much closer to the development process. This also means a cluster of independent bloggers interested in an area of technology can form around the companies working in this space. These tech bloggers have replaced the traditional trade press. It means that a CTO is dependent on voices that are not as tightly controlled as in the past, but these bloggers can also act as an important buffer when problems arise by explaining to the wider circle of users that the company is indeed working on solutions.
• XML. The most common form of XML currently in use is RSS, but OPML is on the rise, and RDF based standards, such as Atom, are also gaining ground. In the long run, some form of global database resembling the Semantic Web will materialize. The key to all of this use of XML is the availability of a company's data outside the corporate database. While much is made of the emergence of APIs, it is the XML data that is available from these APIs that will cause the real changes in technological architectures. Just as Web 1.0 was built on loosely joined websites connected through HTTP and HTML, Web 2.0 will be built on loosely joined data structures based on data produced by many sources. So instead of a CTO building an application on a tightly controlled proprietary database schema, it will be necessary to plan for dependencies on data over which there is no control.
  
  As a long-time database guy, Jack found that disturbing. I share his concern, but what must be understood is that users will demand this type of cross application sharing of data, because it is their data that is being combined from multiple sources. Sure there is a greater possibility of failure, and this must be handled by a CTO to allow for soft failures, instead of hard crashes. The one great fallacy that the XML proponents adhere to is the perfectability of XML data. Their motivation in building a Semantic Web is the goal of a Web that isn't filled with invalid data. I don't think that will ever happen, so a CTO should plan for badly formed XML, as is already the case in the RSS world.
• Fear of excessive valuation. The traditional way to motivate developers, especially in a start-up situation, has been to offer them stock options. While that is still useful, the arithmetic has changed, because programmers who went through the Dotbomb have a deep fear of hype. A business journalist who was a former Dotcom employee recently told me that she still suffered from post traumatic stress disorder that prevented her from considering a start-up job. In the Web 1.0 period, there was an expectation of an IPO that would yield valuations in the hundreds of miliions of dollars. If a Web 2.0 company gets acquired for $10 - $20 million, that may be great for the founders, but it doesn't do much for a coder with a few thousand options. It is not just that the value of software companies have dropped. There is now deep suspicion of any claims of higher valuations in the future. Without the promise of getting rich, it is harder to persuade developers to put in the 18-20 hour days that helped build Web 1.0. This means that the CTO is more dependent on an employee's personal motivations, such as being able to build code that can earn them greater fame in the Open Source world.

Notice that I haven't mentioned any of the popular themes of Web 2.0, such as social bookmarking and tagging. These have their place, but I'm skeptical that there really will be a mass market for meta-meta-bookmarking sites. I don't think that the real contribution of Web 2.0 will be these specific areas of functionality. I do believe, however, that the tools and techniques I have described here will be used to build the next generation of products and sites, and that these will be what are used by the generation of users who are entering college now, and will be entering the workforce 4 to 5 years from now.

I'm going to Mesh in Toronto

Mathew Ingram has been writing about the Web 2.0 conference he's been helping to plan in Toronto for a while, and the site for the conference is now open. The conference is called Mesh and will be held on May 15-16. I plan on going, even though Mathew ignored my subtle hints about appearing on a panel. Maybe next year. If you can make it in TO, you can make it anywhere.

Disruption keeps rippling outward from the Web

The videos showing up on sites like YouTube are yet another example of the ongoing disruption caused by the Web. The Ask the Ninja series is as funny as anything I've seen on "professional" TV. Best line in the "Ninja Gifts" episode: "Giving a ninja something black is like giving crazy to Angelina Jolie."

(via Doc Searles)

Librarians are now software innovators?

When the buzz about Web 2.0 took off last year, the common theme was "we can start innovating again." The key words were "we" and "again." We in this context means American, male, Boomer and Gen X, technology geeks. We did it before with Web 1.0, and now we were going to do it again with Web 2.0 tools and techniques that made innovation much cheaper and faster. The unintended consequence of Web 2.0 is that "we" are not the only ones doing the innovation. In my last two posts, I pointed out that innovation was also being done by Gen W and by people outside of the U.S. Another unexpected source of Web innovation is librarians. Don't get me wrong, I like librarians. I worked in libraries from Junior High School straight through college. It is just that next to accountants, librarians are the last group of people I would expect to jump into new technologies. Actually, accountants adopted VisiCalc first, ushering in the era of microcomputers in business, but they were acting as early users, not developers of new software.

Some of the most interesting blogs I now read are by librarians, such as John Tropea's Library clips, Steven Cohen's Library Stuff, and Lorcan Dempsey's weblog. It was Steven's writing about the UPenn library adopting tags that triggered this post. What's so strange about including tags in a library catalog; they are another form of hierarchy right? No, tags are the opposite of a hierarchy. They are a user generated form of anarchy. Every user may have a different tag for the same idea, and may even spell or pluralize it differently. It's the virtual equivalent of letting users pull the books off the shelves and throw them in big piles. After all those years reshelving books, just thinking about it gives me stomach cramps. Librarians adopting tagging is like capitalists adopting Open Source. Even more amazing is the comment on Steven's post pointing out that the UPenn library has a wiki. A wiki in a library? Why not just let the users strip naked and run screaming through the stacks?

Another link in Steven's post points to Library Thing, an amazing experiment in tagging for books spanning dozens of libraries. It even has a book tag cloud. Okay, so this is still really geeky, but these aren't software geeks who are pushing the envelope. I now realize that I can find cool software ideas by searching for blogs and websites with the word library in the URL. In fact, the blog of the Association of College and Research Libraries (Wouldn't you like to attend their conferences? I'm only kidding guys, I'm sure you have great parties.) just had an excellent post on Library 2.0

This is either really cool, or really depressing

There are apparently over 900 sites that qualify as Web 2.0. If they put it all into an OPML file, it would be cool.

(via Steve Rubel)

Sometimes the anti-Web 2.0 crowd has a point

Coastr.

(via Go Flock Yourself)

Jobs? We don't need no stinking jobs!

After spending time lately with people running Web start-ups, I can see an interesting pattern that I hadn't been aware of. Many of them are Gen-Xers who spent the dot-com era working in IT departments of large corporations, or for large technology companies, like EMC or Adobe. Now that Web 2.0 is presenting them with a market that is receptive for new products and development strategies that have a low barrier to entry, they have quit their jobs and bet their savings on a year or two without a paycheck while they try to build something cool.

This reflects an interesting confidence in their abilities and the market. Part of that confidence shows up in their reluctance to take venture capital money early in the game. That is a reversal of the model in the dot com and the several years after, when entrepreneurs would identify a market need, write a business plan, shop it around, and only start development after the money was raised. This model was based on the idea that VCs played a role in vetting ideas at an early stage; if a plan can't raise money, the product probably isn't going to find a market. It isn't just that this new breed of start-upers don't want to take money early on as a way of preventing dilution of their ownership. They don't think the VCs are necessary to validate their ideas. They know that the market will play that role.

I don't even think many of these people think of themselves as "entrepreneurs." They don't seem to use that word to describe themselves. Maybe it is too much of a Boomer term. They surely want to make money, but even more important is the opportunity to work for themselves. More than anything else, they don't want a job, they want their own company. Maybe it is all that time spent in cubicles. One thing many of them say is that this is their last chance to keep from working for someone else for the rest of their lives. They aren't saying it is their chance to get rich. I think they are running from a life of being held back by Boomer managers. As long as they are doing something out of love for technology, it is better than possibly making more money in a 9-5 job.

Is today's Web 2.0 just another Really Big Button?

This collection of Web 1.0 buttons reminds me of a much earlier Web phenomenon, the Really Big Button. I first saw it in 1995 when it was listed on the Yahoo! What's Cool page. The cool thing about the Really Big Button wasn't what it did, because it didn't actually do anything. It was just a Windows-style button sitting in the middle of a blank web page. If you pressed it, the button actually went down, just like a button should. It was basically a proof of concept for the new style CGI programming, which was the Ajax of the mid-Nineties. The cool thing was that you could create a button that worked on a web page. For programmers it also showed how much easier this type of programming was than Windows. It inspired a generation of coders who went on to build Web 1.0 over the next 5 years. I was one of those people. In 1995 I found the Really Big Button really cool. When viewed in this light, a lot of what is appearing as Web 2.0 changes from being silly to being the first baby step in a progression that will change the way computing works.

(Link to Web 1.0 button page via Google Blogoscoped)

The value of Web 2.0 exemplars

As Web 2.0 matures, conversations about products and websites has shifted from "what is Web 2.0?" to "how is this product different from X?". This is a classic sign of an emerging paradigm shift. Thomas Kuhn, who coined the term "paradigm shift" in the 1960s, used the word "exemplar" as a way of describing recognized examples of a new paradigm. (Kuhn's breakthrough book, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," should be required reading for anyone in the software industry.) Since people think in terms of associations, exemplars serve the valuable role of a hook to which other ideas can be attached. Unfortunately, this way of thinking can be really annoying to people trying to promote their own products. For example, I've been spending some time with the founders of Reddit, a social news site that is sort of like, well, Digg. See how that works? I'm sure the Reddit guys are sick of me asking if they do this or that feature of Digg, but there are benefits to having an exemplar to compete with. Instead of having to explain a product in detail, it is easier to provide a summary of the benefits over the examplar. The simple fact that an exemplar exists is validation of a particular product niche. Being lumped with an exemplar is helpful in getting press when something important happens in that niche, as in this recent post by Kevin Burton. Of course, this can work against you when the exemplar stumbles.

The most important aspect of the development of exemplars is that it proves that a new paradigm is becoming well established in the public's thoughts. When I was doing research on the early history of microcomputer software a few years ago, I read all the issues of InfoWorld magazine from its launch in early 1980 through the mid-Eighties. I found that at first ads for software mail-order companies presented all their products in a long list, either alphabetically or by popularity. It took a few years for software to be grouped in categories. The fact that categories like word processing and spreadsheets finally emerged proved the public knew what these types of software did. I don't want to argue about the viability of Web 2.0, but the use of Web 2.0 exemplars in common discussions shows that people at least know what some of the key Web 2.0 products do.

Maybe I can take up psychopharmacology again

Whenever I tell people I majored in psychopharmacology in college they laugh and say "Yeah, me too." Only in my case it's true. My undergraduate major was in Organic Chemistry with a concentration in psychopharmacology. My first job out of school was synthesizing morphine derivatives. The person at the next bench used pure THC as her starting material. The company I worked for kept a huge jar of it in a bank vault, and took it out to draw samples. It looked sort of like honey. Aahh, the good old days...

Where was I? Oh, yes, psychopharmacology. So when I read about the Chemistry search engine called Chmoogle (via SiliconBeat), I just had to take a look. What is really cool is that you can enter a search query using a java applet that lets you draw the molecular structure. I don't remember the structures of the molecules I used to work with, so I went to Wikipedia and looked up Nicotine:

With all the current fuss about the Feds grabbing Google's records, there's no way I'm going to put the structure of something fun, er, restricted on my blog. Anyway, I used Chmoogle's drawing tool, which is better than anything people dreamed about when I was in school, and then had Chmoogle search for it. I had the option of an exact match, or using this structure as a portion of a larger molecule. The substructure search is great if you are using a specific molecule as a starting material for synthesizing something larger, as I used to do with morphine. The exact match allows you to retrieve all types of useful information about that molecule.

So why should you care? It's not as if you're going to start a personal Meth lab. (Jesus, this post is going to come back to haunt me.) What is important to all of us is that Chmoogle shows what can be done beyond the same old, text style search among general purpose websites. This type of domain specific search holds tremendous promise for all types of applications. You could almost say it is an example of Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 is dead, long live Web 2.0

Web 2.0 pundits are rushing to declare Web 2.0 dead, which leaves us with the problem of what to call it. One of the biggest controveries is whether there ever was an "it". Personally, I'm not in the "Web 2.0 was all hype" camp, but I'm also not sure there was ever a clearly defined set of technologies that could be called Web 2.0. If it takes an essay or more than 5 or 6 bullet points to explain something, it is poorly defined. What I believed last summer when I decided to start this blog and still find true is that there is a renewed sense of optimism and momentum in the computer industry that we haven't seen since the .bomb. This psychological factor, which spawned so many start-ups, is what we need to foster in 2006.

So how do we do we talk about it without a name? Notice that the term Web 2.0 isn't in my blog's title or tagline. I don't care about the specific words we use, but I don't want this momentum to be dismissed as hype as well. That means there is a new industry catch phrase to be invented, with industry fame as a reward for the author. For some reason being the first one to apply a new name carries huge bragging rights. At the Social Architecture conference I went to this past fall, the guy who coined the term folksonomy seemed to take incredible pride in this fact. The search has begun. Thousands of bloggers anxiously await the new buzzword.

The people in greatest need of a new catch phrase are the authors of snark sites, especially my favorite Go Flock Yourself. In his eulogy for Web 2.0 Richard MacManus cites hate blogs as one of his reasons for moving on, and I'm sure he is specifically referring to GFY, which has been mercilous in their attacks. I won't repeat their ad hominems, but let's just say they take pleasure in dropping the second m from his name. I'm glad I never ran into those guys when I was in elementary school. The only thing worse than losing Richard for the snarks would be Flock closing up shop.

Is the Web 2.0 frenzy passing?

It may just be the holidays, but it seems like the excitement over Web 2.0 is wearing off. Even the smarky sites are getting tired. Does anyone else notice this? Now don't jump all over me and say it was just hype in the first place. I think what hit everyone last summer was a legitimate epiphany within the computer world that is OK to come out and play again. Maybe people are just busy working on new projects. I know that I've dug myself in pretty deeply with Ruby, I think it may be time for me to add something new to my studies. As soon as I get the first version of my Ruby aggregator going I think I'll start working with Ajax.

Web 1.1 is more like it

I challenge anyone who understands how all this new stuff, like APIs and Ajax, actually works to look me in the eye and honestly say this isn't just Web 1.1. Come on. Once you get down to it we're talking about new applications of HTTP, and some standards about naming things in text files. Yes, it is really cool, but no, it isn't a new generation of the Web. It's more like the Web moved to California and bought a new wardrobe. But, as long as we all agree to call it Web 2.0, that's what I'll be calling it too.

Why does this feel like integrated software all over again?

I know that I keep hyping the idea of webapps, but an article on Ajax desktops in Publish magazine leaves me wondering how many people actually want such a product. They remind me of the integrated product craze that flared up in the early to mid-Eighties. It was felt by many users and software designers that only being able to run one program at a time was a major limitation of PC-DOS, the dominant operating system of the time. Many software companies started working on the problem of running multiple PC applications simultaneously, and we all know how this story turns out. Some of the companies, however, decided that as long as they were allowing word processors, spreadsheets and databases to work together, they might as well try to sell people new versions of these applications. The users declined this offer and chose to run Windows and individual products for each app.

Software designers always underestimate the desire of users to run individual products for separate tasks. I'm afraid these web desktops will allow me to tie together a collection of mediocre apps, and I'm supposed to be impressed because I can move windows around on a page. I already can move windows around on my screen, that's why its called Windows. There seems to be a fundamental rule that a software company can make a few great products, but nobody can build a collection of best of breed products. Inevitably users choose the unbundled model for greater choice. But to be fair, I'll give each of the seven sites listed in the article a try and report back. I am curious to see just how GUI a webapp can be.

Web 2.0 programmers wanted

A defining characteristic of Web 2.0 is that it is designed by programmers for programmers, where Web 1.0 was designed by media people and merchandisers for consumers. I know that there is a lot of talk about Web 2.0 being for "the people," but those people are supergeeks. In this first phase of Web 2.0 we are seeing the rapid proposal and adoption of "standards." When the dust settles in a couple of years, we'll have one leading standard and a minority, counter-standard in each area, as always. In the meantime, a lot of programmers are going to get hired to write a lot of new code based on these standards, and that is a good thing. Not just for programmers, but for users, since most of these things will be free. The WSJ (behind a paid subscription) today had a slightly confused article about the proliferation of programming languages, with references to both Ruby on Rails and Ajax. The important point is that the reporter and his editors recognized that programming as a cool activity is rising again in the zeitgeist.

Structured Blogging is a key step toward a defacto SAPI

At Syndicate today Marc Canter announced a set of XML data standards for encoding various types of microcontent, such as movie reviews, that he is calling Structured Blogging. This is clearly needed for the growth of features around RSS and the standardization of the XML returned by a SAPI.

The coming SAPI war

If the Web, at least the interesting part of it, is going to look like a huge collection of search engine items, then everyone is going to start building search engines. It's easy to predict a two-tier business model in the future, with major search engines offering API access to their code and data, and a second layer of application developers building cool mashups, remixes, aggregates, whatever, on top of this world wide data base. A major choke point is going to be the Search API (SAPI) used to access this data. It is far too early to tell which API will win, but it is in the adoption of a defacto standard SAPI that the war will be fought.

There is a tradition within the computer trade press to describe such competitive situations as wars. The wide range of military metaphors this provides makes it an obvious choice. Headline writers alone are immensely grateful for its use. We have had spreadsheet wars, and OS wars, and browser wars. Now we can have a search engine war with SAPI as the ammunition.

Search engines have long been tools of individual habit and taste. I use Google, my wife uses Yahoo!. There are toolbar schemes to lock people into one search engine, but users are still able to migrate or use multiple engines of their choosing. If there is a viable business model for an application layer on top of search engines, something still to be proven, then the battle for SAPI lock-in will become brutal, because it will make customer migration or multiple use more difficult. Users won't know, or care, what search engine is running under the hood. To be Web 1.0 about it, SAPI will become the superglue of search engine stickiness.

Exemplars everywhere I turn

I didn't get a chance to keep up with my feeds yesterday, so this morning I sat down with a bulging RSS reader. Yummy! I didn't get past the As before I hit what everyone would have to accept as a perfect example of a Web 2.0 application, Amazon's Mechanical Turk. I decided to list every blog post I read in my morning review that points to such an exemplar:

• Mechanical Turk, this site provides an economic model for a global, microcontent focused workforce.
• AjaxTrans, Ajax powered simultaneous translator page.
• Riya, "extracting value from user-generated content and rewarding the 'long tail.'".
• Evil Search Engines, thoughts about the effect of Google on Hollywood. (via John Battelle)
• Technorati Icon, Dave adds an automated vanity search to his navbar. Well, I guess that is more timeless than Web 2.0.
• Writely, a web-based Word competitor with "import and export into Word format, embedded images, a wysiwyg editor, drag and drop functionality, sharing with others, and tagging of documents."
• Protopage, an Ajax driven personal page.
• Last.fm, a social recommendation system for music.
• Finally, to really prove my point Dion Hinchcliffe has a round-up of his favorite Web 2.0 apps of 2005.

The next time I find myself unable to explain what Web 2.0 is, I'll just point to this post.

I don't know how to evangelize Web 2.0

I just got back from a Christmas party thrown by my old boss, Bruce Twickler. I also got to talk with a couple of other people from Andover.net and one of its earliest investors. These guys were all true Web 1.0 pioneers, so they know what a real wave looks like. They also know me and trust me enough to understand that if I am really excited about something it must be hot, and yet I was unable to explain exactly what changes would be brought about by Web 2.0 techniques. Frankly, tagging is an extremely weak thing to explain, and collective bookmarking and looking at other people's pictures also sound scarily geeky. One thing that did resonant with them was the idea of moving your identity online. Whatever that means. We need some really hot exemplars. Google Maps may have caught some people's attention, but there have to be several more killer Web 2.0 apps to really get the public excited. Does anyone have a way of explaining the changes Web 2.0 will bring to the majority of Internet users in the next couple of years that doesn't involve a multipoint bullet chart? I need one sentence and five sentence explanations.

My Web 2.0 stack

I'm not sure when "stack" came to mean a list of languages/technical standards used to build an app, but it is a useful description. It helps convey the logical architecture within a multi-layered development environment. The best example of a useful stack is LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl or Python or PHP), which summed up what most of us used to build Web 1.0. I've spent the last few months reading and skimming as many new technology books as possible, and I've narrowed down the list of things I need to become proficient in to understand how Web 2.0 works. What I still need is a catchy acronym. Here's the list:

• XHTML. This is basically HTML with some really prissy rules, like case sensitivity, and needing to close all tags. There are said to be tools that will make this conversion for you, but I haven't tried any.
• CSS. Once you understand the basic rules, CSS is a fun way to design a site, especially if you start with a pre-written stylesheet, so you can just change things like colors and spacing.
• XML. While XML itself can be understood in minutes, the many, many ancillary standards and protocols make it tough to find a real-world entry point. I've found RSS programming to be a good starting place.
• Ruby. I've been programming with Ruby for a month, and I'm getting to like it more and more. I think it may have the same level of ease and productivity that made the dBASE language so popular in its time.
• SQL. Yes, its still here, and its still the same, which is the problem. The issue will be fitting the object-oriented data structures of XML into the tables of SQL. The consultants will be paying their mortgages on this one for years.
• Javascript. I could say Ajax instead to assure a higher rating on the Web 2.0 Validator, but Ajax really means Javascript that maintains contact with a server without reloading a page.

Frankly, its not as much as I expected when I started researching Web 2.0 this summer. The good part is that it all fits together easily, and none of the parts are particularly challenging. That's when I am most productive. By the time a language gets as richly, and complexly supported as Java, for example, I get bored and confused and move on.

Get over the Bubble already

The blogosphere needs to get over its obsession with there being another market bubble. Yes, there is a lot of hype around Web 2.0, and many of the start-ups will fail, but none of these "signs" of a bubble have anything to do with the dot-com bubble. That was a singularity, not a model for a repeating cycle. Do any of these reasons for the stock market rise in the late Nineties pertain to today?

• Massive rebuilding of infrastructure in preparation for Y2K. Corporate IT departments around the world bought new computers to replace those that were suspect and hired legions of programmers to check and rewrite code. These programmers were no longer needed after January 1, 2000, just before the crash.
• Deregulation of telcos in 1996 which set that industry on a massive capital expenditure binge.
• The adoption of the Internet. It didn't live up to all of its promise in the first few years, but the mass-market, commercial Internet which appeared in the mid-Nineties will be a major force for change for decades to come. Just because we are calling this Web 2.0, doesn't mean that there is any expectation that this will be as big as the first wave of adoption. That is no longer mathematically possible.
• The intervention by the Federal Reserve in the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management in the fall of 1998 pumped massive liquidity into the financial system, much of which eventually sloshed into the equity markets.

The term perfect storm is over used, especially by headline writers, but the dot-com boom was such a singular event, and the following bust was equally severe. All of its survivors have to calm their nerves and accept a good thing while it is here, rather than wringing their hands and worrying about the next bust.

Is this the Web or a Rocky movie?

VentureBlog has decided that we are now in the era of Social Networks 3.0, and looks forward to 4.0. We need some synchronization of version numbers here. Where do the W3C and the IETF stand on this? (via Om Mailk, whose rounded corners and pastel colors reveal him to still be solidly 2.0.)

Moving from it to them

I just had an interesting conversation with my 22 year-old daughter, who is having problems buying some tickets for Jerry Seinfeld online. At first the entire theater's website was down, now it is working, but the link for buying tickets is not responding. She doesn't understand why it isn't working when the page loads fine. I tried to explain that you can't think about "it", but rather "one of them" being broken. The theater is probably on a different server from the ticketing system, so one can be working while the other is down. She has been using the Web for 10 years, so she certainly understands that sites can go down, but when distributed portions of a site fail, this is often hidden by the page design. I know this is going to be a major confusion for users when sites become dependent on external web services. The dirty little secret of Web 2.0 is that a loosely joined architecture is also more error prone.

I remember that early users of the Web in about 1996-7 were often confused about which site they had actually purchased things from. I ran a software downloading site called DaveCentral, and people where constantly emailing us thinking that they had bought software from our site, when they had actually followed a link to the product's publisher. They also were confused about whether they were still on Yahoo, if they followed a link from there. This may sound silly to today's experienced Web users, but I'm sure that the type of aggregated application that is the basis of much of Web 2.0 will be the cause of lots of user confusion. This isn't a fatal flaw, but it will be an obstacle to overcome. I can imagine the first time a major protion of Google glitches, like the maps, and applications all over the world crash.

When I added the code to this blog to notify blog pingservers with new posts, I found that about 40% of the servers failed for one reason or another. I didn't bother debugging each one, since I had a lot of pings that got through, so I was assured of good search engine coverage anyway. This type of "percent yield" on RSS feeds and APIs should be part of the design, user interface, and user expectations of Web 2.0.

Is it art or software?

The Museum of Modern Betas lists dozens of start-up alpha and beta websites for your viewing pleasure. I was planning on studying the new crop of Web 2.0 sites, and now my list is already prepared. Talk about LazyWeb! (via Supr.c.ilio.us)

Is Web 2.0 a bubble or a revolution?

It seems like "bubble" is getting thrown around way too frequently these days, when a more appropriate word is "revolution." That's what we called it in the early 1980s and late 1990s. There were economic bubbles surrounding both periods, but there is no doubt the personal computer and the Internet caused massive change globally.

I asked Google about this and was told that there are 1.7 million documents for the query web 2.0 bubble and 6.7 million for web 2.0 revolution, so perhaps there is a belief in another revolution?

I then asked Blogpulse and was shown a burst of attention surrounding both bubble and revolution starting at the end of September, the week before the Web 2.0 conference.Unfortunately, it looks like the fear of a bubble has drowned out the hope and perhaps greed for a revolution.

Go Flock Yourself is right

Web 2.0 is "just like Web 1.0 but with rounded corners and pastel colors."

Web 2.0 goes mainstream fast

Man, I'm getting co-opted before I have any opt to co. I knew this Web 2.0 stuff was fun and cool, but it looks like the powers that be get it a little too quickly. The Washington Post now has its own tag cloud connected to an RSS aggregator style feed of their own RSS feeds. They are sitting outside their own site and reading and displaying the content in new ways. That is so Web 2.0.

And in a related story, Amazon now has a product Wiki. So in the past 2 weeks Amazon has started discussion fora, user tagging, and wikis to their product pages. Could they be a little crazed abut collecting user content?

Dave Winer has the best week ever

Ever since I became aware of the Web 2.0 meme I've been telling people that Dave Winer was one of the pivotal forces behind this new wave, maybe the central force. Everyone would have to admit that with GoogleBase turning out to be the world's biggest RSS database, and Ray Ozzie announcing Microsoft's synchronization and replication protocol based on RSS, Dave Winer is having the best week ever! Ozzie's announcement letter can only be described as effusive in his praise of Winer's role:

Microsoft and Google are being maneuvered into a massive game of chicken. I'll show everyone my Office data if you'll show your search data, and Dave is instigating it. My question is what comes next Dave? What are you working on for the wave after this, because I think this one is going to be pretty condensed.

Lest anyone reading this get the wrong idea, I should also make it clear that Dave and I haven't spoken in a couple of years and I'm hardly a sycophant, but that doesn't diminish my estimate of his influence on where the computer industry is headed. For right or wrong, we're riding the RSS train now.

The urge to scale

I guess being a dot-com CTO is in my blood. I like to think through various architectures for managing groups of websites. You need to lock down a model for scaling early or you face big problems if you ever need to handle large amounts of traffic. The real key is a logical architecture for domain names. For example, if I thought I was going to serve a lot of podcasts, I would create something like data.darwinianweb.com or podcasts.darwinianweb.com. That would allow me to move that part of my content where it could be best and most cheaply served.

Right now I have darwinianweb.com to handle this main blog where I plan on covering general issues on the changing form of the Internet. I also have ruby.darwinianweb.com, which is a blog that allows me to go into as much depth as I want about learning the Ruby programming language.

I don't want to have too many subdomains, categorization can be handled more easily and on a larger scle with tags, which I am working on adding. At the same time, a separate domain creates more of a distinct place or channel of thought for the user. People automatically switch contexts when they change to a new site, just like a new TV channel.

I plan on having only a few more content subdomains, such as ajax.darwinianweb.com, and xml.darwinianweb.com. Programming languages or standards like XML are so broad and have so many supplementary tools and resources that they work better in their own site or subsite.

I'll also be creating separate domains for exchanging data with other servers. I don't know what will happen with my API experiment, or if that will become a target for abuse, so I'll also create api.darwinianweb.com to serve API calls. It isn't a matter of large amounts of traffic. I want to be able to shut down the API server easily. Of course, that brings up the issue of dependency on critical servers in a distributed environment called for by Web 2.0.

One solution, which also comes easily in an XML/RSS based communication model, is cache the most recent messages as text files, so the most recent result of an API call can be reused instead of calling the API again.

These issues will be played out on a much larger scale throughout the web. Chains of API dependencies will play interesting roles in the future.

Got to work harder to be Web 2.0

Darwinianweb scored 3 out of 12 on the Web 2.0 Validator. But then Techcrunch.com only scored a 4. Something is wrong with the methodology.

Why blog?

Web 2.0's greatest contribution to society may be in inciting people to greater heights of snarkiness. I didn't even know snarkiness was a realy word, but there are 103,000 Google entries for it, so it must be.

Singing Kumbaya around the Web 2.0 campfire

Maybe I've been reading too much of Go Flock Yourself, but this "let's get together and put on a show" attitude is starting to grate just a little. All the workgroups, and camps, and BBQs are such a sign of the computer industry at another immature phase. When people say things like "There's plenty of room for everyone to compete," you know it is an early stage. How quickly things become zero sum. I remember when the presidents of all the major software companies could fit in a single party suite at Comdex, and did. It may not sound possible today, but Yahoo used to include links to all the competing search engines at the bottom of its results pages. I guess we should enjoy it while it lasts.

Web 2.0 Backlash or Schtick?

Two of my favorite Web 2.0 blogs play the role of guardians of the web from the legions of hype-spewing VCs, but I think that is more of an act than reality. Without stupid 2.0 names Go Flock Yourself wouldn't have anything to write about. Witness this rant about Zoozio:

And Supr.c.ilio.us: The Blog seems more like a collection of wannabes rather than real critics. Still, they are both worth reading for a laugh.

Disruption is the new Disintermediation

The impetus for the latest round of Microsoft naysayers was a pair of memos from Ray Ozzie and Bill Gates. Dave Winer published the complete text of both documents, and they are well worth reading. What I found most interesting is the way they captured the current "Disruptive" zeitgeist. Ozzie's October 28th memo is titled "The Internet Services Disruption," and Gates declares to his troops that "This coming 'services wave' will be very disruptive," in his response on October 30th.

There is clear evidence on Blogpulse that "Disruptive" is gaining favor among the blognoscenti.

Wikipedia tells me that "disruptive technology" was coined by Clay Christensen (from Harvard of course) in 1997 during the run-up to the Web 1.0 boom, but it looks like it will reach a peak with Web 2.0. My own Harvard training tells me that this phrase is a terrible example of technological determinism. Technologies don't "do" anything, people do things with technology, if a host of circumstances are just right. I also can't help but notice how gendered a term this is. Women cooperate, men disrupt, like a bunch of little boys on a playground smashing each others forts.

The rumors of Microsoft's death are greatly exaggerated

The Web 2.0 bubble has reached the predictable stage of assuming that Microsoft will inevitably fail to adapt to this latest tech craze. You can get the feel for it by reading the comments on Scoble's post about this subject. Where have we seen this before? Oh yes, in December 1982 when VisiOn was announced at Fall Comdex and the press (this was before blogs existed) fell all over itself predicting that Microsoft would lose control of the operating system market to the new wave of integrating environments and integrated products. We saw it again in 1995 when Netscape's browser was going to wipe out Microsoft, because Gates just didn't understand the Internet. Now ten years later we are again hearing that Microsoft is a dinosaur and can't possibly catch up with the latest web services wave.

Let's get serious for a minute. Microsoft has control over 90% of the desktops on the planet. I haven't seen any stats that web based apps are being used by even a few percentage points of the real users out there. As keeps happening, especially in Silicon Valley, the bleeding edge sees everyone they know going crazy over a new set of technologies, and they extrapolate that onto the general public.

History has shown repeatedly that first-movers do not always win, and often disappear. VisiCorp died within a few years of announcing VisiOn, and Microsoft won that round with two products that they hadn't even started work on in 1982: Windows and Office. Netscape failed under the weight of their own arrogance, and IE is now the dominant browser. It isn't just Microsoft who has beat the early market leaders. When Google first appeared, Yahoo was firmly entrenched as the dominant search engine.

I'm far from a Microsoft fan. I've made plenty of jokes about Gates being the Antichrist. I just don't see how the race for a set of technologies that may be exciting (I'm excited by the potential of Web 2.0 too), but haven't produced any products that real people (not bloggers) are using in any sizeable numbers is already over.

Microsoft keeps winning these races for two reasons:

• They keep plugging away at an application area until they do eventually get it right. They have the cash and the fortitude to keep retooling until the market starts adopting their solution.
• Their competitors ALWAYS f*** up. This is the part where I may believe in the supernatural aspects of Gates' success. I've seen it too many times, Fylstra, Kapor, Andreesen. There is something about becoming a billionaire, or at least a hundred-millionaire, that warps people's minds and ability to innnovate. Gates has avoided this, but look at Page and Brin with their new 767 toy. The drumbeat for Google as the new evil empire can be clearly heard.

Do I think Microsoft will inevitably win this race? Of course, not. Nothing is inevitable. But anyone who says the race is already over, and Microsoft can't turn the ship around fast enough is either a fool, has an axe to grind, has no idea of the history of this industry, or all of the above.

Multiple bodies colliding with their heads cut off

Ah, for the simple days when it was just Netscape with a browser causing the fuss, and all Microsoft had to do was suck out all their air with IE to kill them. Today, with Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo all competing to do EVERYTHING anyone could ever want (even that is questionable) with a computer, it is almost impossible to tell where the leading edge is leading to. I guess the computer industry expanding in all directions at the same time is the definition of a bubble. The real reason why bubbles form and then expand to extremes is that there is no chance for customer feedback. The Web 1.0 bubble was funded by VC money chasing markets without any time to see if there was any money to be made. Web 2.0 is expanding because the Big Four are locked in a steel cage deathmatch and don't have time to see if any of their new projects in beta will find a positive response from the market. By market I mean actual users in the millions, not just tens of thousands of bloggers.

The return of FUD

I thought the DOJ agreement forbade Microsoft from engaging in the type of massive pre-announcement they performed yesterday with Microsoft Live. Could it be that the rise of Google has let Microsoft out of their box? Since Google has 50% of the search business and is using their position to dominate EVERY other possible use of software on the Internet, I wonder if MS can now argue that they are no longer in a monopoly position?

The biggest losers yesterday were the new crop of Web 2.0 start-ups. It is clear that they are caught in the middle of a battle between Google and Microsoft to spend billions to capture the next round of applications. One aspect of the DOJ's argument against MS was that bundling represented unfair competition because it allowed MS to undercut competitors on price. Now that MS has adopted the mantra of "advertising will pay for it," they are freed to give away anything they want, even if it "accidentally" crushes lots of little guys.

Why I'd rather roll my own CMS

Just when I was feeling silly about building my own blogging CMS I found two posts that reminded me why I like to keep my data in my own system. David Weinberger recently completed the "upgrade from hell" with MoveableType and Scoble is throwing a hissy fit over Wordpress' RSS feed. This is why I don't feel comfortable with other people managing my data. I'd rather do the work upfront than get caught later in somebody else's database.

This brings up a key problem with web-based apps. When a desktop app fails or a major bug shows up, I can at least find some product or write some code to get to the data and transfer it to some other tool. What happens when my data is in a database on some server somewhere? Of course, you have to rely on remote hosting for lots of things. I don't want the hassles of running my own webserver at my house, but I keep a complete working mirror of any site I build, including all the supporting scripts on one of my machines at home. Once my blogging system is moved to Ruby/MySQL I'll certainly host it remotely, but it will still be running my code.

The average user has to rely on other people's code, and it will take years before that trust is solid. Yes, I know that people use remote blogging systems every day, but that is still the leading edge of users. Before we all move to web versions of Office tools, a lot of thought has to be given to recovery. I'm going to assume that any reputable host will keep back-ups, even though that has been proven false also. If users discover that upgrades and new "features" cause them to lose data, there could be a backlash that sets Web 2.0 back a few years. When Word fails, people may curse, but they don't give up on Windows. If a web version of Word fails, they may decide to take their data back where they feel more control.

Lost Generation

Cringely had an interesting post about the aging of the computer industry. His main point is that as baby boomers move "past the peaks of their careers" they will be more willing to publish their work as open source. He has a point, but he misses a more important issue of generational change. The dotcom bust is an event with as much long-term impact as the Great Depression. There will always be a division between those who lived through it and those who were too young. I'm willing to bet that the people who are screaming "Web 2.0 Bubble" the loudest are the ones who ended up with a pile of worthless stock options. These people will never be the same. They'll always have a deep seated fear of hype, even if it is based on real technological and cultural advances.

The peak of the boom was 1998-1999, so anyone who is now 25 years old or less has grown up with the Internet as a fundamental part of their lives, but never went through the trauma of being in a failed dotcom. The talk I went to last week at Harvard was a perfect example. The majority of the attendees were in their early twenties, and they had no fear of making bold predictions about the future of the web.

Cringely may be right in saying that the boomers are past their peak creative years, but the generation who has suffered the greatest loss is Gen X. They came out of college and stepped right into $100,000+ jobs. They ended up thinking that this was their proper salary. Its hard to tell if they'll ever get back to that level, and it isn't likely that many of them will trust another start-up. In many ways they are the lost generation of the Internet.

Now I know where these product names come from

Product names have always been a mystery to me. I thought Yahoo! and Google were absurd, but that was before Web 2.0 names like Zimbra and Ning appeared. Om Malik has discovered the source of these names: Andrew Wooldrige's Web 2.0 name and business plan generator. I used it to create my next startup, Squioliki: web-based auctions via Ruby on Rails.