Recent Posts on "Web2" (Jeremy Zawodny's blog)

What the heck is Web 2.0 anyway?

Later this week I'll be on a panel at the CRV Leadership Summit in Phoenix. The session title is "Web 2.0: The Opportunities and Challenges of the Next Generation Internet" and will be moderated by John Palfrey. The other panelists are: Mike Arrington, Esther Dyson, David Sacks, and Robert Scoble.

In order to have a meaningful discussion, we're going to have to figure out what Web 2.0 is in the first place. So I'm going to jot my thoughts here and then solicit your input. Perhaps that'll help me figure this out.

Back in 2005 Tim O'Reilly wrote What Is Web 2.0 which listed the following traits:

1. The Web As Platform
2. Harnessing Collective Intelligence
3. Data is the Next Intel Inside
4. End of the Software Release Cycle
5. Lightweight Programming Models
6. Software Above the Level of a Single Device
7. Rich User Experiences

Now call me crazy, but Tim's essay did a good job of setting my expectations of what "Web 2.0" should mean. But I've seen the term applied to companies, web sites, and services that fall far beyond those boundaries. Based on popular use and abuse of the term that I've seen, here are three much broader definitions of what some people seem to think Web 2.0 means:

1. Launched after Google AdSense
2. Uses Ajax and/or DHTML
3. Unclear business model, pastel colors & large fonts used

Either considered separately or together, those are pretty broad and perhaps closer to rules for a Web 2.0 drinking game. Unfortunately, they're the most specific rules I'm able to derive based on the amazingly broad set of things which have been labeled "Web 2.0" by the technology press, bloggers, and random pundits.

At first I thought the Web 2.0 Wikipedia entry was mostly a recap of Tim's essay, but then I came across this nugget:

The typical Web 2.0 design elements: the glassy buttons, 'wet-floor' effects, and big fonts. The "beta" sign represents the "perpetual beta".

So I don't feel quite as silly about my overly-broad sounding list. But that doesn't mean I like it either.

Having said all that, what do you think Web 2.0 means--or ought to mean? Or what should it mean in the context of the panel discussion?

Bad Names For Good Things

Derek Powazek makes an excellent point in Death to User-Generated Content:

Calling the beautiful, amazing, brilliant things people create online "user-generated content" is like sliding up to your lady, putting your arm around her and whispering, "Hey baby, let's have intercourse."

They're words that creepy marketeers use. They imply something to be commodified, harvested, taken advantage of. They're words I used to hear a lot while doing community consulting, and always by people who wanted to make, or save, a buck.

Think about the rest of the world. Writers produce stories or articles. Authors write fiction or memoir. These are words infused with meaning and romance. Can you imagine a writer saying "I am a content provider" when asked what they do?

I couldn't agree more.

The things I put on Flickr are photos. And the stuff on my blog? That's writing (or ranting, in some cases).

Nobody has ever commented to me about my "content", but they do mention my pictures or writing from time to time.

Why do we need new, less precise, terminology when the existing language seems to work just fine?

The Business 2.0 Next Net 25 Roundtable

Yesterday afternoon, I headed up to San Francisco to attend the Business 2.0 Next Net 25 Roundtable. Billed as an open discussion among new company CEOs from their Next Net 25 list and other interested parties, the event was very well attended.

Om Malik and friends sat us down to discuss what's really new and interesting, both technology and business, in this new "Web 2.0 Bubble." Of course, several argued that this isn't a bubble at all, and I'm inclined to agree.

My main contribution was an attempt to get people to realize that a lot the most hyped companies have little to do with new technology and infrastructure. In fact, most of the companies are fairly easy to categorize based on their business models and where the money comes from.

• technology/infrastructure/service companies who can charge for their services in various ways. Examples: Technorati, Eurekster, BrightCove, VOIP services, FeedBurner
• transaction oriented companies who aggregate and connect various types of buyers and sellers in a marketplace or data-driven service (think real estate, jobs, travel, etc) and often take a cut of the sale. Examples: SimplyHired, Ether, Edgeio, FlySpy
• content/community companies who aggregate a big group of people around interesting, entertaining, or useful content in one or more vertical markets and rely on advertising. Examples: Digg, RawSugar, Memeorandum

We had a couple hours of spirited debate, discussion, and drinks. The most entertaining comment of the day came from Om himself. Unfortunately, it was "off the record."

There's a batch of pictures up on Flickr. (They got me here and here.)

Thanks to the folks up at Business 2.0 for putting this event together. I suspect the experience was good practice for the "Web 2.0: Show Me The Money" panel I'm set to be on at Microsoft's MIX06 Conference.

Data belongs to those that create it

I was reading over Thinking in Web 2.0 and found myself agreeing with many of the points enumerated by Dion Hinchcliffe. However, the one that most struck me was this: Data belongs to those that create it.

Yes, you heard me. Everything a user creates, contributes, or shares is theirs, unless they have given away the right explicitly and by free choice. Any information they contribute to the Web should be editable, deleteable, unshareable by the contributor whenever they feel like it. This also means indirect data like their attention records, log entries, navigation history, site trails, or anything else that might be tracked. And all Web sites must clearly and simply state what information a user is creating and give them a way to stop creating it and even clean up.

The single most frustrating thing about many services is the lack of any good way to get my data out--either for backup purposes or to import it elsewhere.

Tom's Future of Web Apps, Translated for Product Managers

I've had a tab open in my browser pointing at Tom's Native to a Web of Data slide for a few days now. It's been nagging me. I needed to do something with the ideas encapsulated in that one slide, and tonight it struck me while I was doing something completely unrelated.

Though I wasn't at his presentation and haven't talked with Tom about this, I've decided to annotate (some may say "translate") them for the benefit of the typical MBA laden, non-engineering focused Product Manager that you might find at a large Internet company... or anyone else who cares, really. :-)

Look to add value to the Aggregate Web of data

As a company with infrastructure that can scale to scan, retrieve, and analyze a significant portion of all the public on-line information in the world, think about how you can use those capabilities to improve the world. What can you do that someone looking at a much smaller set of the data cannot? What patterns can be found? What connections can be made? What can you simplify for people?

Build for normal users, developers, and machines

Make whatever you build easy to use, easy to hack, and make it emit useful data in a structured form. That means you need a usability geek, an API geek, and probably an XML/RSS/JSON geek.

Start designing with data, not pages

Figure out what data is important, how it will be stored, represented, and transferred. Think about the generic services that one can build on top of that repository. Only then should you get the wireframe geeks and/or the photshop geeks involved.

This is scary, because you won't have a mock-up right away. Your PowerPoint presentations will look as if they're missing something. But that's okay. This is about doing some engineering style design before product design and interface mocks.

Identify your first order objects and make them addressable

Figure out what your service is fundamentally about. If it's a social shopping application, you're probably dealing with people, items, and lists of items. Nail those before going farther. And make sure there's a way to access each object type from the outside world. That means there's a URL for fetching information about an item, a list, etc.

These are the building blocks that you'll use to make more complex things later on. Hopefully others will too.

Use readable, reliable, and hackable URLs

If the URL is hard to read over the phone or wraps in email, you're not there yet. Simplicity and predictability rule here. Consider something like http://socialshopping.com/item/12345. You can guess what that URL does, can't you?

You may not grasp how important this is, but don't let that stop you from worry about it. This stuff really does matter. Look at how most URLs in del.icio.us are guessable and simple. Mimic that.

Correlate with external identifier schemes

Don't go inventing complete new ways to represent and/or structure things if there's already an established mechanism that'd work. Not only is such effort wasteful, it significantly lowers the chance that others will adopt it and help to strengthen the platform you're building.

You are building a platform, whether you believe it or not.

Build list views and batch manipulation interfaces

Make it easy to see all items of a given type and make it possible to edit them as a group. Flickr does this when you upload a batch of photos. Search, in its many forms, is the classic example of a "list view."

Create parallel data services using standards

Developers (and the code they write) will want to consume your data. Do not make this an afterthought. Get your engineers thinking about how they might use the data, and make sure they design the product to support those fantasies. Again, always default to using an existing standard or extending one when necessary. Look at how flexible RSS and Atom are.

Don't re-invent the wheel.

Make your data as discoverable as possible

The names and attributes you use should be descriptive to users and developers, not merely a byproduct of the proprietary internal system upon which they're built. This means thinking like an outsider and doing a bit of extra work.

Platforms, Mashups, and Markets

Yesterday Greg Linden asked Is Web 2.0 nothing more than mashups? In that post, he makes the following claim:

Companies offer web services to get free ideas, exploit free R&D, and discover promising talent. That's why the APIs are crippled with restrictions like no more than N hits a day, no commercial use, and no uptime or quality guarantees. They offer the APIs so people can build clever toys, the best of which the company will grab -- thank you very much -- and develop further on their own.

I believe that a lot of folks are wondering about that too. They're more than a little suspicious of companies like Google and Yahoo! opening up APIs. (Amazon and eBay can't hide their profit motives, so nobody even wonders about that.)

Related to that, Fred Wilson asks When Is A Market Really A Market? He's focused specifically on on-line advertising, but his questions apply equally well to lots of other on-line "markets" as well.

So, I believe that right now, we have a marketplace, but it’s a nascent marketplace. The thing that gets me so excited, though, is that is so clear where all of this is headed.

I claim that these two discussions are actually related by the notion of a platform.

The platform is what you must build today in order to create a new on-line market. To be clear, the process goes something like this:

1. Build new "open" platform
2. Get critical mass (this is where mashups start to come in)
3. Add financial incentives, creating a marketplace
4. Profit!

That leads me to ask the only unasked question so far. In the Internet of 2006, what's it mean to be (or create) a "platform"? What is a platform? Is one necessary to create a new marketplace online?

What do you think, based on the evidence we've seen so far?

TiVo + Flickr = Cool

Okay, I'm starting to wonder if I shouldn't have sold my TiVo last year. If nothing else, this Flickr API and TiVo HME Experiment would have given me a nice way to browse photos from the comfort of the recliner.

Of course, I can do that with a laptop and get a higher resolution at the same time. But still. Isn't that cool? :-)

This is exactly the kind of stuff that can happen in the Web 2.0 world when vendors think of themselves as not just service providers or hardware vendors. If you think of yourself as platform for developers and invest a bit of support getting them started, a ton of interesting stuff seems to sprout.

Many companies could learn a lesson from this--including the one I work for. How about an IMVironment SDK for starters?

Human AdSense?

Cory snapped a picture of me being a human advertisement for Google at Google's Web 2.0 party. Looking at it later, the phrase Human AdSense came to mind. Imagine, free t-shirts printed with contextual ads suited to the wearer's personality (or their social network).

Maybe that is what Orkut is all about? ;-)

Yeah, yeah... it's Friday and I've had an insane but fun week.

Jerry Yang, Closing Session at Web 2.0

It's been 10 years already.

Jerry had a baby recently. Having a baby is harder than running a startup.

Q: Did/do you want to do anything else?

A: It feels like a blink. The time has gone by very quickly. Yahoo is a constant work in progress. We don't want to look back too much because you can lose sight of the future. Some things are still true while others have changed.

Q: The very early days. He shows an old Yahoo home page. David has strict rules about the home page. He shows the current home page. How's the old one make you feel?

A: Old.

Q: What sort of decisions went into this?

A: It's about continuing to evolve Yahoo as a reflection of what's going on on-line. It's more about services now--not just content. The industry has evolved, but so have the users. The next generation of uses have completely different needs and expections.

Q: What dumb things did you do over the years?

A: To do it over again, we'd maybe not have taken it public so soon. The IPO was in 1996 (pre-bubble) but it would have been nice to wait. The tradeoff was letting competitors do it and get the money sooner than Yahoo? And the exposure helped too. The competition helps.

Q: What advice would you give to Larry and Sergey?

A: They've gotten great advice and are doing everything they can. I hope they enjoy every minute of it. What they've done is truly amazing.

Q: Did you learn something from them?

A: I think the world did. This is a different environment.

Q: When Yahoo was young, there was a lot of idealism. Why is the Yahoo brand so versatile?

A: It's the name. But it's not a right or entilement. We have to earn that privilege from our users every day. We missed some emerging trends a few years ago. And we'll make more mistakes--2.0 mistakes, hopefully.

Q: During that era (early 2002), campus was very sad. You got a new CEO. He got a lot of credit for the turnaround. Rumors about Disney?

A: I think that Terry's done an unbelievable job. But rumors are rumors (or speculation). As far as I know he's very happy and has a lot of Yahoo stock--that's a good motivator.

Q: What about the data lock-in issue?

A: Data is a very personal thing. Yahoo is in the trust business. We can only be viable if people trust us with their data and let them do what they want with their data. We have policies (beyond the law) about what we can and cannot do with user data.

Q: What won't you do on the Web?

A: Violate trust. There's a social contract here.

Q: In terms of products.

A: Not what Kim is doing [SpikeSource]. We hire people smarter than ourselves. But it's really about doing something that we can do better by integrating into Yahoo. RSS links you out to the rest of the Web--takes people off Yahoo. But we're being more open and transparent. Some things are better on our network, some not.

Q: What keeps you up at night? (Other than the baby!)

A: The Web 2.0 revolution and convergence. We need to figure out where Yahoo belongs in that world. Worried about the next 2 guys who are gonna drop out of the Standford PhD program.

Audience Questions

Q: Jeff Jarvis recruits Marc Canter but then asks Jerry about his old job: "get people in and out of Yahoo as fast as possible." That's changed now. There's a clutter now. Where's the UI going? Is Yahoo too clutered?

A: Yes. Our biggest challenge it finding ways to let users know what we have. The home page needs to offer users more control. This isn't about broadcasting what everyone wants. But we still need a way to inform users about what is new at the same time. And we're trying to figure out how to unclutter. Everyone uses Yahoo differently. The UI may change in this broadband world.

Q: Marc says things to Jerry about the one size fits all mentality. But then asks about Open Source infrastructure. Amazon, Google, eBay are examples. But we need non-big company standards. Marc wants a tiny big of the billions to help support Open Standards. What do you think about helping the world?

A: I like helping the world. We're big advocates of Open Source and employ Open Source folks (core commit). As for APIs, we're a 10 year old company with numerous other companies folded in, we've realized the necessity of getting our own services to talk to each other. We're working on this inside. It'll hit the public when the time is right. We'll keep pushing it. I believe in giving back. Giving money away is harder than making it. If it can make a real difference, I'm willing to consider it. It's less about the money and more about pushing this as a whole. Money is easy. What impact are we going for?

Q: Adam Rifkin asks for a good bubble story?

A: Trying to get a free version of a book.

Q: What will Yahoo look like in 10 years? What's it look like and what is it on? Predict.

A: 10 years ago today would have seemed like a disappointment on the UI front. But he'd have underestimated the impact. So 10 years from now, Yahoo will be a brand and service that makes people's Internet Life easier. Devices, entertainment, community, interaction, appeal to emotions. If people are still happy using Yahoo in 10 years, I'll be a very happy guy. Hard to set anything else in stone. "It took us 10 years to get blogs?!"

Q: Instant messenger. There was a hack that let you access AIM. Why not make it available?

A: That's up to them, not us. If the other side wants to shut if off, they can. IM has to interop in the future. It's like having three telephone networks.

Q: Esther asks about China?

A: I'm a Chinese American, but understand the industry and business in China. That society is changing very fast. There's what you see and what you don't see--what people are saying. They're saying hopeful things. They have new confidence. But they're on a path that's a one way street. The middle class needs more education, technology, freedom, and so on. Those will drive freedom of speech and communication. We operate in China. So we are helping the government but I don't agree with their government. There are other governments we don't agree with either. We're not a big player there today. We need to invest in the next generation there.

Time for the iPod giveaway now.

See Also: My Web 2.0 post archive for coverage of all the other sessions I attended.

Kim Polese Introduces SpikeSource, High Order Bit at Web 2.0

Kim is here to announce her new company: SpikeSource.

"From egosystem to ecosystem: Web 2.0 and Enterprise IT."

Brazil kicked out Microsoft. Same with other governments. They demand Open Source. China is doing a Linux distro. Vendors are getting kicked out.

The industrial egosystem has worked well for a long time. It produced many large companies that were big top-down organizations. It's worked well for software too.

Then the Net came along. It changed advertising, commerce, and the software business. It's a home on the range for software developers. This new ecosystem will be filled with lots of new software, much of it Open Source. This gives power to the users. It's a revolution that we cannot stop.

Why is this happening? How'd we get here? OOP, CORBA, COM, etc. were attempts in the egosystem. But they didn't work. We needed a new ecosystem. And that ecosystem has arrived as Web 2.0. Demand began to supply itself.

Programmers started it--"scratch your own itch." Users followed. Wikipedia. Blogs, RSS, PodCasting. The old egosystem doesn't like this. Microsoft doesn't like it. Larry Ellison loves Open Source but thinks the software industry is headed down. Nicholas Carr says that IT doesn't matter--it's boring and a commoidity. It's a cost to control.

The IT guy is the unsung hear of corporate america. And in this new ecosystem, he's a superhero inside the new ecosystem.

Examples: Verizon phone booths getting wifi hotspots. Many cities are getting wifi. IBM mainframes as Linux farms.

Three rules: Nobody owns it. Everybody uses it. Anybody can improve it.

When anybody can improve software, it gets better. People participate. It's filling the software market with commodities. Customers love it, but the egosystem hates it. In fact, there are too many open source choices. That's hard for IT.

SpikeSource is here to solve that problem. They're an open source IT services company. They're moving up the stack to solve the new problems in the ecosystems. They'll provide pre-assembled stacks. 35 employees and contractors. Public beta in December. It is: validation, integration, testing, supporting, service/upgrading.

See Also: My Web 2.0 post archive for coverage of all the other sessions I attended.

Larry Lessig, High Order Bit at Web 2.0

Free Culture is his new book. Someone at Forbes didn't like it and called him a moron. That was a remix! He took Larry's words and added his own to say something different. That's a freedom in our culture that we've had for a long time. It's free culture.

Writers know this when dealing with text. But what if you go beyond text into other media? Music: white album, black album, grey album. Film: $218 film at Cannes. Politics: political media remix videos. (He's showing us some hilarious videos now.)

The potential of digital remix. All you need is a $1,500 computer (or less). It's democratic. It's part of a bottom-up democracy. NYT to blogs, peer to peer.

Problem. Laws make this illegal. Permission required to use copyrighted works like this. But getting permission is far too hard to get. The laws have massively changed. Copyright went from opt-in to opt-out in 1978. That takes us from free culture to a permission culture.

Fox News vs. the movies Outfoxed.

Text-heads think this is an easy problem.

The Induce Act is not dead. It's a really, really big threat.

We need to make digital culture free.

BTW, Lessig has a great presentation style--compelling and engaging.

See Also: My Web 2.0 post archive for coverage of all the other sessions I attended.

Brendan Eich (Mozilla), High Order Bit at Web 2.0

The Browser is Back!

Tons of people in the audience are using Firefox already. And it's a worldwide thing--not just in the USA. Demo of RSS auto-discovery on Jon Udell's blog. Tabbed browsing, all the great features.

"Worse is Better." The web has made it hard for anyone to pull another Windows off. Firefox runs on Windows 2003 - 98. It's a platform and it's compatible with the Web. Mozilla is about quick functional code (scripting), not big OO systems.

Standards bodies are too slow. Just using consensus of interested people, you can create new standards. On IE, just create a little plug-in. The <canvas> tag is an example of this. Easy 2-D graphics.

Mozilla is also involved in the W3C standards work.

Mozilla update works via REST. SOAP didn't scale.

E4X brings XML to JavaScript. It should have been there long ago.

Open Source and the Web are good enough for 2.0. Don't need a specific OS.

See Also: My Web 2.0 post archive for coverage of all the other sessions I attended.

Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster (Craigslist), High Order Bit at Web 2.0

Craig now calls himself a customer service rep and spokesmodel. Jim is the CEO.

Quick overview of craigslist, but most everyone here already know what it is. The site exists to help with personal and social needs--think of moving to a new city. They've hired a PR person recently. They have less than 20 employees but are one of the biggest sites around.

Much of craigslist comes from nerd culture and ethics. Be good to others. Make a culture of trust. Users can flag things. This forms a self-policing system that works quite well. Lightweight business model. They're un-branding (no logo or banner). They're de-monetizing because they don't charge for much of anything other than job postings. They're un-competing. They think of themselves as a public service.

The use Free Software all the way. Pine for e-mail. Apache. The simple stuff works very well. They're going slow and steady in these "internet time" times.

See Also: My Web 2.0 post archive for coverage of all the other sessions I attended.

The Platform Revolution, a Panel at Web 2.0

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.

New Blog Category: Web 2.0

Since I've blogged a ton of stuff on the Web 2.0 Conference, I've tagged each entry into my web2 category. The archive page is located at http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/cat_web2.html.

Thanks to Atul for reminding me I wanted to do this. :-)

See Also: My Web 2.0 post archive for coverage of all the other sessions I attended.

The Architecture of Participation, a Panel at Web 2.0

Tim is leading a panel composed of Andrew Anker, Brian Behlendorf, Bob Morgan, and Allan Vermeulen.

Tim noticed that the best open source projects are architected for participation. Brian gives an overview of what makes Apache work: transparency is very important, so are general APIs (well known connection points) so that folks can build modules as separate projects.

Tim asks Andrew about how this affect's Andrew's business. What made blogs work was RSS: content and style sepration. Aggregators are big. They let you read many, many blogs. "Blogs are Geocities 2.0" (Are you listening Yahoo folks?!)

Tim asks about Amazon.com. Amazon is a technology company, unlike other retail operations. They've been thinking along those lines. What makes it easy for customers to get all the info they want?

Tim asks for figures but Amazon doesn't have numbers handy. Over 500,000 associates. Over 65,000 using Web Services.

Ofoto has nearly a billion images.

Photo sharing obstacles? Lack of interop. Too much friction. Users need it to be easier.

Tim asks about where the business advantage is in participation. APIs and plugins matter in software--they're a form of participation. A Wiki is a great example, since anyone can edit. Trust then starts to matter a lot.

Walled gardens are doomed to fail. People want to contribute. But what makes them willing to contribute?

Brian tells story about Jazz fans, Nora Jones, and Blue Note Records web site forums. The execs took the site contents down because they weren't happy. So the bad mouthed the label instead of her music.

Peoople optimize for the tools you give them. Today that means linking. And linking is authority today. But there's some gaming going on too. Politics often gets in the way.

Amazon doesn't worry much about negative reviews. But giving users ALL the informaiton, they're more apt to shop there over the long haul. Blue Note needed a community manager.

Software has names (people) attached to it nowadays. There's status.

Tim just called me a cross-over from Open Source to the Blog world.

Blogging is working the enterprise where KM failed.

Photo sharing is used by professionals too: real estate agents, for example.

Amazon uses MT internally.

Question about community longevity. Can communities outlive games, for example?There are different types of community, some specific and some general. What about explicit vs. implicit.

A former RedHat guy who did community management. RedHat management got blogs on the site but almost didn't turn on comments and they nuked posts at one point. Sun doesn't have comments. Where do companies draw the line? Should companies control the message on their own turf? Shutting that stuff off just means it'll happen elsewhere. Tim: This is the future. Get used to being more open.

See Also: My Web 2.0 post archive for coverage of all the other sessions I attended.

A Conversation With Marc Benioff at Web 2.0

Marc is the CEO of SalesForce.com.

The quiet period was "interesting" but the IPO went quite well. They announced customer and subscriber numbers. Over 185,000 subscribers and 12,000 customers.

He thinks the SEC needs to be changed. But he's unwilling to provide any concrete advice.

The process of coming up with recommendations for the government (he's the co-chair of a government committee on technology) is apparently very interesting work. There are a lot of smart folks on the committee and there's a ton of stuff on the horizon. Security, for one, is a big deal.

(Editorial note: What's this stuff have to do with Web 2.0 anyway?)

They're talking about ego jousting now.

Ah, they're back on track and talking about web services and software as a service. Marc says it's a massive opportunity. Really, really big. It's like the client/server revolution but even better.

They're still very, very early on the technology adoption curve. That means most folks in IT don't get this stuff yet. Not even close.

There's a lot of preaching to the choir going on here.

Marc is giving a platform overview now.

Can Salesforcce.com benefit like Amazon.com from web services? Too early to tell.

More preaching about how this is the future.

Jason Freed is asking about CRM for small businesses.

He thinks that small businesses can use their stuff too. And that competition is necessary in this market.

John notes that BoingBoing has twice the readership of The Standard with only four people.

Andrew Conru (Friend Finder), High Order Bit at Web 2.0

Andrew is telling us how get got into this business and what we can learn from the adult industry. FriendFinder.com has 89 million users, 180 employees, etc.

Users began to upload more "interesting" photos, so they started AdultFriendFinder.com. They've branched out into intls, religious groups, etc. Users log a lot of time on their sites. They're close to Google based on those figures.

Adult sites know about making money TODAY. They're always looking for good conversion rates. Lots of cross-promotion.

Tricks they use: clients, toolbars, popups, spam, spyware, adware, affiliate marketing programs, etc. A Collaborative Traffic Network let's them track clicks across many sites. They really know their sales funnel and how to reduce charge backs from the credit card companies. They optimize the hell out of this stuff.

Rich media, live and streaming, etc. Why are they so innovative? Large number of publishers, so there's A LOT of contribution. Big tail. The traffic source controls the advertising, not the advertisers. There's a ton of money in this. $445 million spent in 2003 for adult content on-line. But margins are getting tighter--there's lots of content and hard to differentiate. Search engines make it easier to compete on pricing.

The industry is evolving. Registration and personalization (longer term view). Reducing entry/exit pop-ups. Using softer pitches and create a better user experience.

Over-optimization in the short term is a danger, so think long term.

See Also: My Web 2.0 post archive for coverage of all the other sessions I attended.

Brewster Kahle, High Order Bit at Web 2.0

Brewster (of the Internet Arcive) is telling us that universal access to all knowledge is possible. And that's what he's trying to do.

26 million books in the Library of Congress. Half are out of copyright. A book is about a megabyte. That's 26TB of data, which costs $60,000 to store today. Google announced this morning that they're digitizing in-print material and out-of-print material soon. It costs about $10/book to do scanning. That's $260 million to get the whole thing.

Copyright is an issue that we need to figure out. Especially orphaned stuff--out of print but still in copyright. It's about 8 million books that we can't digitize them. Lawsuit: Kahle vs. Ashcroft. (Heh)

Do we want to read books on screen? For $1/book, you can print and bind a black and white book. Lending from the library is supposedly $2, so it's cheaper to just give the books away!

Audio. 2-3 million discs exist. 700 bands, 1,600 concerts, lots of taped stuff that bands let you trade. It's a community. 200,000 different songs. Lots of fringe stuff is well served by the Internet. Non-profit record labels working well but need hosting. So the Internet Archive will offer unlimited bandwidth and storage forever for free if you use a Creative Commons License. It shouldn't be a penalty to give things away--but it is on-line.

Classical music is one thing they need--a good collection.

Moving images (movies). 100,000 - 200,000 movies. About half are Indian (?!). 300 on-line now w/out copyright. This is also doable. There are even Lego movies.

TV. Recording 20 channels in DVD quality 24 hours a day. They have around 1 petabyte already.

Software. The DMCA let's them do that too.

Web. The Internet Archive is already well known. 20TB/month growth.

Over 1GB/sec of traffic. Multiple copies around the world.

See Also: My Web 2.0 post archive for coverage of all the other sessions I attended.

Joe Kraus Demos the JotSpot Wiki, High Order Bit at Web 2.0

Joe is doing a short demo of JotSpot, a new generation Wiki that makes it easier to add structured data to the system in addition to pulling in external data via RSS, Web Services, and so on. Very cool stuff. Their Wiki is easily scripted, so I can imagine using it to protoype loosely coupled web applications.

He's showing SalesForces.com integration via SOAP right now. Nice. He's pulling in Yahoo News RSS feeds for topics on his pages.

So it's a Wiki with structure that you can evolve into a full-blown application. This feels like Lotus Notes re-invented for the web or something.

See Also: My Web 2.0 post archive for coverage of all the other sessions I attended.

Gian Fulgoni, High Order Bit at Web 2.0

He's gonna run thru a ton of data, so I'll see how much I can capture here...

Their data based on watching 2 million users via an opt-in service. (Available on ComScore.com)

Broadband growth and penetration is impressive. 160 million users on-line in the US. Broadband is close to 50% and growing fast. On-line spending should hit $148 billion in 2004. Broadband users spend more money than on dial-up (50% more). The more someone is on-line, the more they spend too.

People are spending money on big ticket items (home furniture, jewelry etc). Consumers are clearly comfortable spending on-line. Over $1 billion a year in paid content. Personals/dating is big too.

On-line banking is growing fast. People aren't as scared of security issues as much. On-line bill payment is on a similar trajectory.

Bandwidth consumption changes. P2P vs. applications vs. other. P2P is decreasing--it's about 20% vs. 50% of bandwidth a year ago.

34 searches/month is average. 4 billion per month in US. Three buckets of searchers: heavy, medium, light. 20% of searchers conduct 68% of searches. What happens when the medium and light folks ramp up? More spending. The searchers are the buyers. Brand share among these folks is interesting. Cost seems to be a key factor in surviving in this market.

The Internet is going to have a bigger and bigger influence on spending decisions, career/lifestyle, and so on.

Looking at intensity of browsing to forecast auto sales. There's a strong relationship. People who look at cars on-line buy cars. Intensity of visits to job sites is reflected in government employment figures (interesting!).

See Also: My Web 2.0 post archive for coverage of all the other sessions I attended.

Bill Gross Debuts Snap, High Order Bit at Web 2.0

Bill started Overture and is now working on something new via Idealab. He's interesting in Web search technology. But we've just seen the beginning. Search leads to the start of a journey. So they want to improve the post-search part of search.

They've got: user control, user feedback, and transparency.

Demo time!

Search engine called snap. It is, of course, in beta.

User Control

He runs a search. Results have extra columns you can use to re-order the search results. You can use CTR, conversion rate, cost to advertise, popularity, satisfaction, domain, and so on. (This is very, very interesting.) There's a real-time reduction of the results as you refine the query. And re-sort. (Damn!)

He did a search for "camera" and we got structured data back--like camera features. It's a built-in shopping/product finding system.

User Feedback

He searches for "Walmart". He gets feeds of ISP traffic data. He find that most of the time when folks search for Walmart, their next action is to go to Walmart's web site. That's popularity. But you can also see average page views. This stuff is hard to spam, since it's aggregate data of millions of users. (This is really f%*&ing cool!)

He searches for cars and gets another set of great results.

Transparency

Expose how the system works. They'll add an API soon, but right now you can get all the data they have on the sites they know about. You can buy ads based on various metrics too--even transaction data. Stats abound, including Snap's revenue from the site. (Crazy, huh?)

See Also: My Web 2.0 post archive for coverage of all the other sessions I attended.

Jeff Bezos, High Order Bit at Web 2.0

It's Web 2.0 but it's still Day #1. Jeff is showing the first every Amazon.com home page (Web 0.0). Search was not on the home page. No personalization. Web 1.0 (today's Amazon) is very different. Customized, personalized, nine years of evolution. You can buy live lobster.

Web 2.0 is different. It's about AWS (Amazon Web Services). It's not on the web site for users to see. It's about making the internet useful for computers. More APIs coming. AWS 4.0 is out. Lots more data comes back now. This all helps them sell more products. You even get paid for using them!

In Beta is Alexa Web Services--get access to the web crawl. (Excellent!) So this means you can find out if Alexa things a site is slow or fast. Adult or not. Links in, links out. Related web sites (based on usage data).

Demo time: MusicPlasma.com from France. A completely visual interface to Amazon.com product data (relate albums, etc).

ScoutPal is a service that uses cell phone with bar code scanners to lookup info on books in real-time (like at a garage sale). "It's like hunting with radar." (Very cool looking.)

A9 is completely build on top of web services too. Web results via Google, Image results via Google, Book results via Amazon.com, Movies from IMDB, Reference info from GuruNet, and so on. Even the search history service. Web services used internally are even a win.

Tim asks when this "rip, mix, burn" model of building web apps starts to stomp on someone's business model. Jeff says you ought to be charging for some web services. They'll evolve and good business models will emerge. Tim says Amazon and eBay have a built-in model, so it's easy for them. Tim asks about exposing one-click as a web service. Jeff doesn't know.

Tim asks about Amazon being a change junky. They're far beyond being an ecommerce site. All the user invitation makes them different. What's the secret ingredient. Jeff says you need to find the unique aspects of your company's offerings--but you can't give 'em away for free. Find a way to charge. Inviting customers to participate is very important for Amazon. If it improves the customer experience, they want to do it.

Tim asks Jeff about using his fortune for space travel. He's definitely going into space. :-)

Someone from Wired is asking about the book scanning and search inside the book. What kind of data does Jeff want to make this stuff really go? Jeff talks about data that's hard to get to becuase (1) it's not in digital form or (2) it's very valuable and locked away. They solved #1 for many, many books. The second one is far harder to crack.

Someone from Macromdia asked about Amazon apps in Flash or with fat desktop clients. Amazon likes doing the desktop thing themselves. Others can add on via the APIs.

The guy who designed the effects for the Matrix trilogy is here, asking Jeff about on-line games and multi-player universe style games. Jeff thinks its coming. Sims is just the beginning.

See Also: My Web 2.0 post archive for coverage of all the other sessions I attended.

Web 2.0 Welcome: State of the Internet Industry

John and Tim are on stage. It seems we have about 600 people signed up for the conference. Wow. (Power strips coming tomorrow.)

John: The "high order bit" sessions will be short, impactful, and likely have announcements. BoF dinners tomorrow night. Signup board outside the big room.

Tim: Big themes for the conference. The web is a development environment. Content and retail sites are now software components that you can call via APIs (official or otherwise). PC application stack was intel at the bottom, others in the middle, and Windows at the top. However, tody we have NetSol at the bottom, Open Source (Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc) in the middle, and the Big Guys at the top (Google, Mapquest, Amazon.com, etc). The lock-in at the top is via network effects. (I don't completely agree, but I know what Tim's saying.)

Letting your customers build your business: eBay, Google, Blogging (Blogger, SixApart), Amazon, Flickr, and so on. Invitations to the user make Amazon very powerful. Tons of people are inputting content into the Internet.

Microsoft won the browser war but it doesn't make them any money. The value has migrated elsewhere (to the app layer). O'Reilly is doing Safari U. This generation has a Web Services API in addition to just the Netflix model. Now you can integrate into something like the Eclipse editor. Profs can build custom documentation sets or books.

The end of the software upgrade cycle. The web is always updating, so when you've got a good browser, you don't need to do anything before you can take advantage of them.

Software that runs above a single device: iTunes (and the iPod). "The Power of the Tail" means you can have a lot of small players that all survive. Google AdSense takes advantage of the tail.

See Also: My Web 2.0 post archive for coverage of all the other sessions I attended.

Publishing 2.0 at Web 2.0 (Rojo Demo)

Chris Alden (formerly of Red Herring) is showcasing Rojo and talking about how it came to be. (The session title was John Battelle's idea.)

Publishing 1.0 was more about on-line magazines. We thought of them like magazines with structure and hierarchy, etc. Central planning of editorial content, display ads, brand was very important.

Publishing 2.0 is... suits vs. pajamas?(!) Publishing 2.0 penalizes those Big Media who publish first but get the story wrong. But how do you know who to trust?

It's about: forums, posts, memes, contextual ads, reputation, organic, merit-based, rapid-fire, self-correcting. "Every page is a front page." No single point of failure. But there is chaos too!

Aggregation is here. Yahoo News vs. CNN. Google News.

Feeds are The New Way. They're optimized for dynamic content. Feed are doing for reading what blogs are doing for writing.

Cool, nobody in the room will admit to not knowing what RSS feeds are.

Advertising in feeds IS happening.

Rojo is here to make that stuff more useful and accessible, via rojo.com and through partners. So it's time for a demo of the beta. (Yes, betas abound.) It's an invite-only trial, in the tradition of GMail--sort of.

Web-based RSS aggregator. Lots of color and some fancy DHTML tricks. Tabbed interface. Mark read/unread. E-mail story to someone. Looks fairly clean. Chris is speculating on the future market growth of RSS readers. The product has these sort of virtual folders that seem to be based on a search. Interesting. They're personal groupings of feeds (not posts?). Actually, no. They tagged by the user. They're tags, not folders.

They provide starter folders for users. All the views/folder can be exported as RSS for viewing in other aggregators (excellent).

There's a Social Networking Community component too. You can invite people, create a connection, and then see each others sub lists. You can see which stories they flag (mark as important). It's like a linkblog. (Yup, Chris confirmed that.)

Fine-grained permissions will let you control exactly what other users can and cannot see. Users control their own structure and taxonomy.

There's a "recommended channels" feature, of course. Cool, they have a feature like Bloglines citations.

Marc Canter is asking how "people discovery" works in the system. Since it's an invite only system (right now), that's built in.

What's the business model? They're saying it'll be a free service with contextual ads. But there's the notion of a human aggregation model they're tinkering with. When another blogger helps you find good blogs, etc. Maybe you could build the next Gizmodo on top of Rojo? Infoworld has something at infoworld.rojo.com to see what Infoworld folks are reading/recommending. It's an interesting blend of reading and writing.

It's a federation system.

Steve Gilmor is asking about syncronization and switching costs (as he does in every session). It's not there today, but they want to do it.

Want an invite? Mail web2@rojo.com to get one.

See Also: My Web 2.0 post archive for coverage of all the other sessions I attended.

Aggregated Web 2.0 Coverage

There's a page on the Web 2.0 Conference site that's aggregating blog posts and coverage about the conference session.

They must be doing it manually or via a search query, 'cause I'm not pinging anyone special.

No XML button on that page. Is there a feed?

Update: O'Reilly has added feeds. That was FAST! Thanks.

See Also: My Web 2.0 post archive for coverage of all the other sessions I attended.

Dialing on the App Tone at Web 2.0

Rich from Topix.net and Stewart from Ludicorp/Flickr are here to lead the discussion on "how the early Web OS is shaping up." Rich is summarizing his post on the Google OS.

Stewart is discussing how Flickr came to be and why they decided to use Web APIs for it. "App tones" like dial tones for the phone system. The APIs have been a bit help to Flickr so far.

Rich asked me about my Yahoo Web Services post and then noted that Topix.net gets a ton of users via My Yahoo... and they're making money from it.

How do APIs make money? eBay has a very good system in place for tracking API usage and how much money it makes. They can actually place a dollar value on individual developers. Wow. 40% of GMS (Gross Merchandise Sales) comes via the API. Holy crap!

Book recommendation: Platform Leadership.

Steve Gilmor asked how developers react to things like Sender-Id where some worry that the standards author may have other motives. Discussion didn't really go anywhere.

Flickr, GMail, del.icio.us are primarily about organizing your data. Flickr has a voting/reputation system for tagging (interesting!).

Lots of talk about why companies do APIs and small vs. big company innovation. Without standards, there's no way to stitch together various services (such as Yahoo and Flickr, since their photo system is better than Yahoo's).

Hey, there's a little Yahoo love-fest going on here. But it won't last long.

Lasting Web 2.0 companies should try to become a global platform for something or other? Does that imply always being big? It does mean APIs.

In some countries people don't use their own computers, they use cafes and such. How does that affect Web 2.0 companies?

Backing up photo archives "to the internet". Flickr, Gmail (!), and so on.

Syncing is important. Lots of devices. Data everywhere. Lots of it is moible.

There's nobody in the room from Google.

Someone just brought up IM technology. All platforms are closed except Jabber, which has no adoption. Skype uses the public network but keeps data private (encrypted). LiveJournal has security. Many services do not.

Who should provide centralized services like IM and so on when there's no clear business model? Government? Libraries? Bob Wyamn doesn't like libraries because of political interference.

The services that take off are those that operate around data we create ourselves. But syncronization becomes an issue again.

Uh oh, Steve Gilmor wants to beat up on me. I think I'll schedule the beatings for dinner time. :-)

I plugged FeedMesh briefly.

See Also: My Web 2.0 post archive for coverage of all the other sessions I attended.

Lightweight Business Models Lightweight Business Models at Web 2.0

Jason Fried from 37 Signals is speaking first...

Lots of small advice tidbits on how to design products in the new world. For example, protoype the app quickly. Don't build a ton of features, build a few really great deep features and then move on from there. Don't worry about up-front functional specs and fully documented requirements. Faster development and better products are the result. Say no by default. New features must beg to be added. Make sure there's a real demand for 'em. It's an agile development model.

The hidden costs of "new." When you add a feature, it's re-training, updating docs, howto, training, maybe the terms of serivce, and so on.

Release a major update 30 days after launch. Have stuff planned for this, just keep in your pocked for the 30 day update. Builds momentum and good will with your users. Use it while you build it. Eat your own dog food as soon as possible. You'll learn (and fix) a lot.

Iterate in the wild. Put beta features on the real product and turn them on for users selectively. Don't have a separate beta site. Who'd go there? But how big should that group be? 5-10, Jason recommends. Plus the team. What about the power users. Be careful with then. Some may outgrow the product, so you need to expect and recognize that. Don't deal with novice users (huh?).

Listen to the usage data (logs) as much as the users themselves. But don't focus on it too much (of course). Hype features that have vocal communities (RSS, iCal (Mac freaks)) etc).

Marc is up now...

Flickr is good. Open Source means open APIs so that services become open [source] infrastructure. Smart email, blogging, aggregators, moblogging, location based services, etc. They're all new battlegrounds. Things are changing and evolving. John Battelle is a great example of this himself. From old media to new. Enterprise tech moving into home. People are also bringing tech into work, going around the IT folks. Why did Comdex die?

Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL are still the same. Haven't evolved yet. The new stuff doesn't necessarily need VC funding. Open standards change things. Blogging is the first kind of microcontent.

Quick overview of blogging (does anyone here not know this?). The future is new kinds of microcontent. "If you think blogs are big... wait until we have standards for meetings, people (friends), reviews, etc. We can build multiple ecosystems on top of this stuff. But the aggregators need to grok it. FOAF. Need a digital ID wrapper so we can build social networks around them. Sxip Networks may help this. They want to build the Digital ID infrastructure and make it ultra cheap. It's close to open source digital identity.

Now we see a network, where the center or "hub" is the DLA (digital lifestyle aggregator). It's based on open standards. Ourmedia is an outgrowth of this. It's a giant registry of Creative Commons licensed media. They're building APIs and schemas for open source jukeboxes, image albums, directories, and more.

OpenEvents is APIs and schemas for events, calendars, etc (ticketing, iCal, etc). Reviews too. OpenReivews.

So where's the business model? (It's about time someone asked!)

The business is in mining the data that's in the open. Build "compelling experiences on top of it", whatever that means.

There will be aggregator businesses and content or specific service businesses. (Or something like that.)

Hmm, I think Marc just dodged my question about sucking down all of Flickr's data. He switched to job listings and craigslist. I asked if Flickr (which he just used as an exmaple) is a service in this new model or one that's going to get all their data scraped (well, not scraped, but you can use their API) so that someone else can build one--and if that's an OK thing? Should Flickr allow it and/or be pissed if it happens?

OpenTrust? Doesn't exist yet.

Marc thinks the RSS wars are waste of time and effort.

Rich is using the Open Directory as an example of openness destroying a business. dmoz is rotting?

Someone just said: Jason is here to create value while Marc is here to destroy it! :-)

Got a question in about Sxip Networks. They're cheap. Marc says that for Yahoo it'd be $500/year. And for smaller operations, $50/year. Interesting.

Lots of discussion of making money vs. being open. This tension is not going away. Marc argues that there are many ways to make the money.

See Also: My Web 2.0 post archive for coverage of all the other sessions I attended.

RSS and Syndication Business Strategies at Web 2.0

I'm in the RSS and Syndication Business Strategies workshop at Web 2.0. We're discussing how to slice and dice the publishing world: big business, small publishers, random people, etc. RSS has many uses, so it's hard to figure things out and explain it to users and publisher. Some use it to syndicate content to other sites, some use it in personal readers, and so on.

Is there a clear difference between "commerical" publishers and everyone else?

Ooh, some Yahoo bashing (I expected that--Steve Gilmor is here). Discussion of on-line aggregators reporting usage/sub stats back via User-Agent. Bloglines and Yahoo do this. Feedburner may solve the problem. Bob Wyman (pubsub.com) is reminded of when AOL first turned on proxies--some folks freaked out because there was an intermediary between the user and the publisher. From impressions to click-thru tracking.

I think Bob wants an affiliate model. My feel of the room is that it's all about the money. Given that this session is about business strategies, that's unsurprising. How do we share the money?

Does RSS destroy centralized marketplaces when commerce and marketing enters the picture? Or does it simply lower the barrier to entry? (I think it just lowers the bar.) Lots of discussion on the future of eBay. Will they stay the same or become a trust and recommendation engine?

Damn, this room is full of smart people! I'm getting sucked into listening more than writing (gasp!).

LiveDeal vs. eBay vs. craigslist. How can one subscribe to a feed of all sofas for sale within 5 miles of home?

Tagging matters. But people lie and are lazy. Google made it automatic--to some degree. Why does tagging work on, say, Flickr? (Because of the personal incentive.) Same with eBay and del.icio.us.

There are many publishing models and it's really too soon to tell who's going to win. AdSense gets things started. Jeff Jarvis calls it "the lowest end of the value chain." (I think.)

We need to get publishers and potential publishers to grok RSS and users to grok readers (not the technology).

As expected, the discussion has wandered quite a bit. But it's been quite interesting.

See Also: My Web 2.0 post archive for coverage of all the other sessions I attended.

IRC at Web 2.0

Some of us are hanging out in #web2 on irc.freenode.net. Feel free to join in.

See Also: My Web 2.0 post archive for coverage of all the other sessions I attended.