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March 25, 2005  Web 2.0

Original Post: 23 Mar 2005
Updated: 25 Mar 2005

We're on to Web 2.0. "But we're not even finished debugging Web 1.0," you say. Oh well. With God as Product Manager you have little choice but to upgrade.

What is Web 2.0? Well you can read the Wikipedia definition, if you feel inclined or keep reading while I attempt to unravel it for myself.

Web 1.0 was pretty cool. Remember GeoCities? That was funny. You would make an ugly website, and GeoCities would stick ads all over it. Yahoo, King of Web 1.0, bought Geocities in May 1999 for $6.4B and a lot of Web 1.0 people got rich. What made this whole thing so Web 1.0? The sites you would make on GeoCities were islands: no comments from visitors and with mostly static information that you would have to update by hand. To find things you would search using Yahoo, Google, etc.

Now we've entered a world where content creation has radically changed. We've got blogging tools like Blogger and Movable Type. We've got wikis like Wikipedia. This makes collaboration a joy. People leave comments on blogs, trackback when they post a response on their own site, and create a feedback loop in to the system.

All this information is then syndicated using RSS, which allows for a whole new way to consume the data: with RSS aggregators like Bloglines and ANT, container sites like the Open Media Network, RSS search engines like Technorati, or bookmarking tools like del.icio.us and Furl. These tools then allow you to syndicate out what you're consuming via syndication, creating yet another feedback loop.

One of the most compelling examples of this sort of feedback loop is the success of the photo sharing site Flickr, recently acquired by Yahoo for around $30M. Flickr is not particularly large. It has a user base of 270K, which is tiny compared to the 300M people that use Yahoo on a daily basis, but it is growing at 30% per month.

So what's so Web 2.0 about Flickr? Well, unlike Ofoto or Shutterfly, Flickr is built around the idea of community. Sound too fuzzy for you? Okay, Flickr assumes most people will default their permission settings on their photos to public, not private, and will syndicate posts using RSS. Call it social networking meets photo hosting meets syndication. That means that you can subscribe to a feed on squared circles and receive the updates as they come. How does Flickr know if something is a squared circle? Well you tell it by adding the tag. What if you don't have time? Someone else can tag it for you. Yes, collaborative tagging. Why would someone tag your photos? Why not. Flickr CEO Stewart Butterfield explained in an interview with O'Reily's Richard Koman: "Some people really are primarily using it for sharing photos with friends and family. They have contacts in the system and select certain photos to be only available to friends or family, only occasionally making a photo public. The majority, though, are making almost all of their photos public. Of those 3.5 million photos, 82 percent are public.... [People] derive some pleasure from building value in the global collection."

And this is the key insight that is driving Web 2.0: what we had initially thought of as private data is being incorporated in to a collective consciousness. My life's journal of photos, written entries, Internet bookmarks, who I like, where I eat, what I think about and when I think about it... it's all getting syndicated out to the world. And as people tune in, that creates a feedback loop. I tune in to them tuning in to me. Together we go about exploring something as simple as a squared circle or as complex as whether or not Kruzweil is correct about the idea that "exponential change is subtle".

Where do we go from here? Well, we may not have a choice. There is a natural progression to these sorts of things, and we may be along for the ride. But there is a chance to make a contribution. It's not clear whether your code or mine will power the pistons, but it's clear that someone's will. So we can spend our days building the Yahoo 360s, the iMeems, and, gulp, maybe even a HeyPix or two. Along the way we'll post to our blogs about the long tails, and what we ate for breakfast. We're embarking on a new era where we will know, as Michael Rollin put it, "that which will emerge from the structured amassment of all human knowledge, thought and behavior patterns". Now that I think about it, maybe we should call it Web 2.5.

Update:

In response to the launch of the new Yahoo! Creative Commons search, which allows you to find content that is free for distribution for non-commericial purposes as licensed under the Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig--Stanford Law Professor and chair of the Creative Commons project--had the following to say: "This is exciting news for us. It confirms great news about Yahoo!. I met their senior management last October. They had, imho, precisely the right vision of a future net. Not a platform for delivering whatever, but instead a platform for communities to develop."

That's what I was trying to convey with this post about Web 2.0. To repeat: "They had, imho, precisely the right vision of a future net. Not a platform for delivering whatever, but instead a platform for communities to develop."

Posted by johnnie at 12:49 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

March 12, 2005  Web Content and Social Networks

The social network is a means, not an end. That may be a simple idea, but if you think about it within the context of Friendster my bringing it up will make more sense. Friendster popularized social networking software, which is built around Stanely Milgram's "small world phenomenon": we're all connected to each other by at most six degrees of separation. The idea is that if we all tell a database who we know, I can network my way over to Bill Gates or some cute girl that I want to ask out via my friend network. It's simple, fun, and promising; Friendster took off. Then we got a whole host of other social networking sites: Orkut, LinkedIn, Tribe, MySpace... the list is dozens long. Some were focused on business relationships, which kept out the twelve year-olds leaving love notes for each other... others like MySpace embraced it. In the end we were left with a lot of options for telling the database who we know, but little that would revolutionize how we share, collaborate and communicate with the people we care about.

In parallel with the social networking sites we've had a host of other products to help us tackle that last issue: instant messaging, blogs, photo sharing, peer to peer file sharing, Bloglines, and iPodders.

So what if we could slam all this stuff together in to a well-designed, unified package? It'll be fast, bug-free, and easy to use. When it's all done we'll call it Xanadu and spend our days drinking tea and playing backgammon with Ted Nelson.

Although I haven't talked to anyone in the company, this sort of mentality and ambitiousness seems to be what's driving imeem, a new application that allows you to create personal, private networks, chat with people, share photos and files using peer to peer communication, and create your own blogs.

imeem is currently in a private beta, but I started using it yesterday after a friend at Google sent me an invite. The minute I realized this was a client application and not a website it clicked for me that these were people who thought like I thought. Once I learned that the co-founders, Dalton Caldwell and Jan Jannink, came from Stanford the it started to make more sense to me. I feel like the students at Stanford understand the web better than students at other schools (thanks to Google and Yahoo!, this un-researched claim is easier to defend). And part of understanding the web is understanding that not everything needs to live in a web browser.

imeem has that 1.0 feel: lots to love, lots to hate. I applaud them for their efforts and wish them the best. Now I need to get back to work on my latest project, which is similar in spirit.

Posted by johnnie at 07:01 PM | Comments (0)

March 06, 2005  The discHub

The Product Design division at Stanford University is a rare and wonderful program. In combination with one of the world's best student machine shops, it gives students the tools and support to build pretty much anything they can think up.

Alex de Rouvray built a CD storage solution for his senior project in 2001. Stanford emphasizes finding a unique point of view, and for him it was figuring out what to do about the temporary storage problem: those CDs stacked around the computer or stereo because the person needs quick access to them. The discHub was born.

I've been using the discHub for about a year now, and it's handy to have around. With the number of discs burned off of a spindle, having some place to put them so that they don't get scratched before they're moved to a book sleeve is convenient.

Jon Bruck worked with Alex to bring this product to market. They have a website where you can buy one for around $12. You can also get one for free if you sign up for Netflix through the website.

There are competing products but one thing that's interesting about the discHub, in addition to the product design, is how it's being marketed.

It's tapping in to the power of the blog community: site's like Josh
Rubin's Cool Hunting, Gizmodo, Engadget and others. With the help of RSS tools like Bloglines, blogs are becoming a more common way to find out about relevant news and products. Now if I could just get a strong collaborative filter, I'd be all set.

Posted by johnnie at 09:08 PM | Comments (0)