What Is Web 2.0 – Tim O’Reilly

Kathleen Gilroy of the Otter Group pointed me to a very useful article, What Is Web 2.0, by Tim O’Reilly on the next generation of the Web. Here are some of the key principles that I pulled out of the article. In some cases I modified O’Reilly’s text to shorten the message. The long article provides much more and context for these trends.

1. In Web 2.0, the value of the software is proportional to the scale and dynamism of the data it helps to manage.

2. To be successful, like Google Ads, you need to leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head.

3. Network effects from user contributions are the key to market dominance in the Web 2.0 era.

4. Tools like blogging harness the wisdom of crowds by using collective intelligence as a kind of filter as the collective attention of the blogosphere selects for value.

5. It is content now. Every significant internet application to date has been backed by a specialized database: Google's web crawl, Yahoo!'s directory (and web crawl), Amazon's database of products, eBay's database of products and sellers, MapQuest's map databases, Napster's distributed song database.

6. Now Web 2.0 era software is delivered as a service, not as a product, like Google vs, Netscape, so there are no software releases, just continuous improvement: Users must be treated as co-developers, not simply customers.

7. Think syndication, not coordination. Simple web services, like RSS, are about syndicating data outwards, not controlling what happens when it gets to the other end of the connection.

You can see that this is a shift in orientation and that blogs and wikis are prime examples, but certainly not the only ones. Google, Map Quest, Amazon, eBay are prime company examples. What Is Web 2.0, will become a classic article. Here is a telling quote to consider:

"...a recent ZDnet editorial concluded that Microsoft won't be able to beat Google: "Microsoft's business model depends on everyone upgrading their computing environment every two to three years. Google's depends on everyone exploring what's new in their computing environment every day."