Tim O'Reilly is leading a panel featuring: Adam Bosworth (Google), Kevin Lynch (Macromedia), John McKinley (CTO @ AOL), Halsey Minor (Grand Central Communications).
Adam thinks that Web Service is not yet a platform but is close.
What kind of clients will we use?
Kevin sees lots of non-browser clients: iTunes, aggregators, etc.
What's AOL going to do to get into the 2.0 game?
John says that AOL needs to catch the wave. They need to expose metadata.
Tim asks about IM.
There's an AIM SDK w/Macromedia. (News to me.)
Grand Central story?
Web 2.0 is about the business use of the Internet. SLAs don't exist yet on Web services.
Adam talks about the difference between things that are simple enough to work all over vs. the standards that standards bodies produce (REST vs. SOAP, RSS vs. Atom). He notes how important it is that blogs make self-publishing easy for everyone.
From industry standards to commercial standards. What is RSS? Adam says it's not a standard and it doesn't matter.
Tim asks what these guys are scared of? What's missing?
Chaos in usability as apps migrate outside the browser. We're behind in some areas, like wireless. Adam is scared of fragmentation. How do you build an app that runs on every phone? You can't. What if we have 1,000 different apps that each only run on some devices/platforms? We don't have that with the web. We have instant updates and easy deployment on the web.
Tim: You afraid of Microsoft?
Depends on whether Avalon and such are relevant. They might have IP issues that get in the way and slow down the rest of the world. Microsoft depends on machine upgrades. But will you really need to do that for Web apps?
Open Source?
Adam: when things become commodities (open source stuff) things get better.
Firfox? That's a case of open source really improving the world.
Audience Questions
Remember Netscape? They should they could outrun Microsoft. Open Source seems to think the same thing. What about Web Services and reliability?
Adam says that cell phones are unreliable. HTTP and browsers aren't either. But it still works. When the value is there, people deal with it.
Don't discount Microsoft. "Quality is Job 3.0"
Modern apps really need engineers and designers to work very closely together.
Adam says that Microsoft got it right by building great developer tools.
REST is good for query but not for transactions. But the big tool providers are making standards (WS-Security) that rely IP that's owned by those guys. That means the Open Source communities may be out in the cold.
Adam thinks that the complexity is more important than the IP issues. Is Microsoft really going to sue a random developer for supporting WS-Security? Unlikely. The problem is that the average PHP hacker can't figure it out.
What can PayPal do to push REST and security? Adam says just publish a spec!
See Also: My Web 2.0 post archive for coverage of all the other sessions I attended.
Posted by jzawodn at October 07, 2004 03:31 PM
