Initial Google service was framework for ‘Web 2.0’

Peter Vogel

In my previous column I mentioned the wildly popular Pandora music service. Time Magazine recently flagged Pandora www.pandora.com as one of the top 10 so-called Web 2.0 products of 2006.

To be clear, the term Web 2.0 does not have an exact definition. It was first coined by publishing group O’Reilly Media in 2004 at a brainstorming conference intended to look forward to web developments arising from the ashes of the dot-com collapse in 2001.

An O’Reilly paper on the matter suggested that Web 2.0 be visualized “as a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles.”

Put another way, Web 2.0 envisaged “the web” as a platform for the delivery of services, with web browsers and web servers being little more than commodities. As the O’Reilly conference perceived it, the real value would lie in the services.

Remember Netscape, free browser and high-priced web servers that would be sold to industry? Where is Netscape today? Some might say that Netscape, the company, was a victim of old-style software marketing that just didn’t fit in a web-enabled world.

Fast forward to Google, a “product” built entirely for the web, as a service. Google products were never sold in stores. You might argue that the initial Google service was the framework for Web 2.0. Google’s entire business model was built around the web. One way or another you “paid” for the Google service through its advertising structure.

You get a better sense of the Web 2.0 concept from some of the conversion lists drawn up at that initial O’Reilly conference. Consider these comparisons, a “Web 1.0” item listed first and then the Web 2.0 equivalent, at least as it was perceived back in 2004:

We get a better picture of the intent of Web 2.0 thinking from various “mind maps” developed at those early sessions. One of these, which O’Reilly actually refers to as a “meme map,” illustrates the Web 2.0 principles particularly well, and I will summarize some of these here in text form.

At its core: the Web as a Platform, with users controlling their own data. One level down, several core competencies, among them:
Services, not packaged software.

Cost-effective scalability.

Remixable data source and data transformations.

Harnessing collective intelligence.

Surrounding this core, O’Reilly’s map depicts further key requirements for a 2.0 service:

• Trust your users.
• Small pieces loosely joined (component-ized web).
• Rich user experience.
• Software that gets better the more people use it.
• The right to remix with “some rights reserved.”
• The perpetual beta.
• An attitude, not a technology.

O’Reilly’s examples help put some of this in context. For instance, Wikipedia places almost complete trust in its users and contributors; eBay and Amazon depend on users as contributors for quality and trust rankings; GMail and Google Maps are examples of rich user experience environments; and BitTorrent is possibly the best current example of a decentralized web application.

Many Google applications fit the perpetual “beta” label. While the Google search facility has finally shed that moniker, GMail, for instance, hasn’t. Several dozen customers of the Google mail service will say it doesn’t deserve to any time soon: they lost substantial portions of their mailboxes recently.

To add a little perspective to some of this Web 2.0 hoopla it might be worth reading some of the observations by longtime PC Magazine columnist John Dvorak. “Web 2.0 conferences fill up with high and mighty speakers pontificating about a Brave New World where everything is cool and you can share photos and download music!” he writes in an early 2006 piece.

“Web 2.0 is the latest moniker in an endless effort to re-ignite the dot-com mania of the late 1990s. This one seems to be succeeding. The problem is that little has changed. Bad ideas of the past have been renamed and spiffed up. We’re watching a classic example of “old wine in new bottles”: changing the label doesn’t make the wine any better, but it does get us to buy more wine.”

Nevertheless, let me throw out a couple of new services that fit aspects of the 2.0 concept as envisaged by O’Reilly et al.

StumbleUpon www.stumbleupon.com is an application that will either immediately captivate you or you won’t give it another look. I’ve long made it an unwritten rule that I won’t download browser toolbar applications. I made an exception in StumbleUpon’s case. The download is small and the footprint is unobtrusive on the desktop, so if you are interested in “stumbling upon” high quality web sites in a wide variety of areas of your choosing you won’t go wrong trying this service.

Jajah www.jajah.com is billed as the world’s first free telephone-to-telephone service, both local and international. Unlike Skype or GoogleTalk, Jajah requires no downloads. The web-based service is used to initiate phone calls but everything else happens with the handset, either landline or mobile.

Non Jajah users can be telephoned at very low per minute rates similar to those offered by companies such as Yak Communications. Jajah also offers a host of cut-rate pay-for-use services such as conference calling and desktop-based SMS (text messaging).

Expect to see the Web 3.0 label any day now!

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In the “no surprise” category, web traffic analysis company Hitwise reports that the American web sites showing the largest increases in market share in the two-day period from December 31 to January 1 (think New Year’s resolution) were Biggest Loser Club www.biggestloserclub.com up 146 per cent; eDiets www.ediets.com, up 82 per cent; and category leader Weight Watchers www.weightwatchers.com up 70 per cent.

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Hurry. You’ve got just two months to look up the assessed value of your neighbour’s home: www.bcassessment.bc.ca.

Peter Vogel is a Physics and Computer Sciences teacher at Notre Dame Regional Secondary School (www.ndrs.org). Suggestions and comments may be sent via e-mail to peterv@portal.ca.