More on Web 2.0: Some Poster Children and Why

I continue to try to get my hands around Web 2.0 or where the Web is going. A number of people do not like the term but there were 16,600,000 Google hits on “web 2.0” on November 2 with the O’Reilly Conference by that name on top. I do not really care what they call it but I think a term is needed and it seems that many of the “people” have voted. I recently wrote about an article by O’Reilly himself, What is Web 2.0, and had a chance to look at it again on a plane ride last week. Thanks again to Kathleen Gilroy for frist pointing out this article. So here is some more

It seems that the main issues are web services (2.0) vs. products (1.0) and the rise of participant driven services in particular. eBay is the poster child here, as is del.icio.us. I use the term participant for several reasons. First, people are able to participate more. Second, users sounds either too techy or people as addicts. Third, I was taught as a research psychologist that people in experiments are participants and not subjects and the training has held.

Microsoft has even become converted with its annoucement that it is moving into free ad supported web servcies. Here is a link to the NY Times story, Microsoft Introduces Web Services, Competing With Google and Yahoo.

I wanted to record in this post some of the poster children of this movement in different categories. I will be pulling some material from the same O’Reilly article here, just shorten and paraphrased a bit to make it shorter.

Yahoo! was born as a catalog of links, an aggregation of the best work of millions of web users. This role as a portal to the collective work of web participants remains the core of its value.

Google's breakthrough in search, which quickly made it undisputed market leader, was PageRank, a method of using the link structure of the web rather than just the characteristics of documents to provide better search results.

eBay's product is the collective activity of all its participants; like the web itself, eBay grows organically in response to user activity. eBay's competitive advantage comes almost entirely from the critical mass of buyers and sellers, which raises the barrier for any new entrant offering similar services.

Amazon sells the same products as competitors and receives the same product descriptions, cover images, and editorial content from vendors. But Amazon leverages participant engagement more than others. They have more user reviews and invitations to participate in varied ways on virtually every page--and most importantly, they use participant activity to produce better search results. While a Barnesandnoble.com search is likely to lead with the company's own products, or sponsored results, Amazon always leads with "most popular", a real-time computation based not only on sales but other factors that Amazon insiders call the "flow" around products.

del.icio.us and Flickr have pioneered the rise of "folksonomy" (in contrast to taxonomy), a style of collaborative categorization of sites using freely chosen keywords, often referred to as tags. The participants created the tags and build the categories, hence folksomy. Interestingly, Joshua Schachter, the founder of del.icio.us said at a recent Berkman session that he does not like the term folksonomy as sees his program as a memory aid and not a participant driven category building system.

Cloudmark is a collaborative spam filtering product that aggregates the individual decisions of email users about what is and is not spam. This allows it to outperform systems that rely on analysis of the messages themselves.

This list goes on but here are some of the poster children and the reasons for their inclusion. Do you have any other nominations?

Comments

[Sam Stearns]

I really like reddit (www.reddit.com)- a list of user-submitted links that rise and fall due to popularity. It definately skews to a geeky crowd though.

Nice to meet you today Bill!

Cheers
Sam