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Website - Web 2.0 Discription Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software
The bursting of the dot-com bubble in the fall of 2001 marked a turning point for the web. Many people concluded that the web was overhyped, when in fact bubbles and consequent shakeouts appear to be a common feature of all technological revolutions. Shakeouts typically mark the point at which an ascendant technology is ready to take its place at center stage. The pretenders are given the bum's rush, the real success stories show their strength, and there begins to be an understanding of what separates one from the other.
The concept of "Web 2.0" began with a conference brainstorming session
between O'Reilly and MediaLive International. Dale Dougherty, web
pioneer and O'Reilly VP, noted that far from having "crashed", the web
was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites
popping up with surprising regularity. What's more, the companies that
had survived the collapse seemed to have some things in common. Could
it be that the dot-com collapse marked some kind of turning point for
the web, such that a call to action such as "Web 2.0" might make sense? We agreed that it did, and so the Web 2.0 Conference was born.
In the year and a half since, the term "Web 2.0" has clearly taken
hold, with more than 9.5 million citations in Google. But there's still
a huge amount of disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means, with some
people decrying it as a meaningless marketing buzzword, and others
accepting it as the new conventional wisdom.
This article is an attempt to clarify just what we mean by Web 2.0.
The list went on and on. But what was it that made us identify one
application or approach as "Web 1.0" and another as "Web 2.0"? (The
question is particularly urgent because the Web 2.0 meme has
become so widespread that companies are now pasting it on as a
marketing buzzword, with no real understanding of just what it means.
The question is particularly difficult because many of those
buzzword-addicted startups are definitely not Web 2.0, while some of
the applications we identified as Web 2.0, like Napster and BitTorrent,
are not even properly web applications!) We began trying to tease out
the principles that are demonstrated in one way or another by the
success stories of web 1.0 and by the most interesting of the new
applications.
1. The Web As Platform
Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn't have a hard boundary, but
rather, a gravitational core. You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of
principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of
sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying
distance from that core.
Web2MemeMap
Figure 1 shows a "meme map" of Web 2.0 that was developed at a
brainstorming session during FOO Camp, a conference at O'Reilly Media.
It's very much a work in progress, but shows the many ideas that
radiate out from the Web 2.0 core.
For example, at the first Web 2.0 conference, in October 2004, John
Battelle and I listed a preliminary set of principles in our opening
talk. The first of those principles was "The web as platform." Yet that
was also a rallying cry of Web 1.0 darling Netscape, which went down in
flames after a heated battle with Microsoft. What's more, two of our
initial Web 1.0 exemplars, DoubleClick and Akamai, were both pioneers
in treating the web as a platform. People don't often think of it as
"web services", but in fact, ad serving was the first widely deployed
web service, and the first widely deployed "mashup" (to use another
term that has gained currency of late). Every banner ad is served as a
seamless cooperation between two websites, delivering an integrated
page to a reader on yet another computer. Akamai also treats the
network as the platform, and at a deeper level of the stack, building a
transparent caching and content delivery network that eases bandwidth
congestion.
Nonetheless, these pioneers provided useful contrasts because later
entrants have taken their solution to the same problem even further,
understanding something deeper about the nature of the new platform.
Both DoubleClick and Akamai were Web 2.0 pioneers, yet we can also see
how it's possible to realize more of the possibilities by embracing
additional Web 2.0 design patterns.
Let's drill down for a moment into each of these three cases, teasing out some of the essential elements of difference.
Netscape vs. Google
If Netscape was the standard bearer for Web 1.0, Google is most
certainly the standard bearer for Web 2.0, if only because their
respective IPOs were defining events for each era. So let's start with
a comparison of these two companies and their positioning.
Netscape framed "the web as platform" in terms of the old software
paradigm: their flagship product was the web browser, a desktop
application, and their strategy was to use their dominance in the
browser market to establish a market for high-priced server products.
Control over standards for displaying content and applications in the
browser would, in theory, give Netscape the kind of market power
enjoyed by Microsoft in the PC market. Much like the "horseless
carriage" framed the automobile as an extension of the familiar,
Netscape promoted a "webtop" to replace the desktop, and planned to
populate that webtop with information updates and applets pushed to the
webtop by information providers who would purchase Netscape servers.
In the end, both web browsers and web servers turned out to be
commodities, and value moved "up the stack" to services delivered over
the web platform.
Google, by contrast, began its life as a native web application, never
sold or packaged, but delivered as a service, with customers paying,
directly or indirectly, for the use of that service. None of the
trappings of the old software industry are present. No scheduled
software releases, just continuous improvement. No licensing or sale,
just usage. No porting to different platforms so that customers can run
the software on their own equipment, just a massively scalable
collection of commodity PCs running open source operating systems plus
homegrown applications and utilities that no one outside the company
ever gets to see.
At bottom, Google requires a competency that Netscape never needed:
database management. Google isn't just a collection of software tools,
it's a specialized database. Without the data, the tools are useless;
without the software, the data is unmanageable. Software licensing and
control over APIs--the lever of power in the previous era--is
irrelevant because the software never need be distributed but only
performed, and also because without the ability to collect and manage
the data, the software is of little use. In fact, the value of the
software is proportional to the scale and dynamism of the data it helps
to manage.
Google's service is not a server--though it is delivered by a massive
collection of internet servers--nor a browser--though it is experienced
by the user within the browser. Nor does its flagship search service
even host the content that it enables users to find. Much like a phone
call, which happens not just on the phones at either end of the call,
but on the network in between, Google happens in the space between
browser and search engine and destination content server, as an enabler
or middleman between the user and his or her online experience.
While both Netscape and Google could be described as software
companies, it's clear that Netscape belonged to the same software world
as Lotus, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and other companies that got their
start in the 1980's software revolution, while Google's fellows are
other internet applications like eBay, Amazon, Napster, and yes,
DoubleClick and Akamai on Web 2.0.
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