The Perpetual Beta
- The traditional software development lifecycle is being severely "warped" by the Web and SaaS
- It’s a very different proposition from shipping software on a CD
- You are connected directly to your users 24×365
- If you’re servcie is down, so are all your Customers
The pros and cons
- Pros: Network applications provide numerous advantages over old apps: two-way connection to your users, a way to leverage the intrinsic strength of the network to growth, the issue with distributing updates are over
- Cons: Ayou must scale and scale and scale some more. And you must be reliable. Reputations can be destroyed in hours
The value of experience
15 years on the Web has taught us a lot: Simplicity now reigns in technology and standards
- Simple is more genearal purpose and easier to understand and comply with
- People tend to migrate to the easiest ways to solve their problems.
- Examples: RSS, Ruby on Rails, declarative programming, even blogs, wikis
The business model aspects
- Building open platforms instead of stand-alone apps
- Spreading your product beyond the boundaries of your site (APIs, wigdets, badges, syndication, being everywhere else on the Web)
- Building on the shoulder of giants (Leveraging APIs from Amazon and others)
- The automated mass servicing of markets of low demand products (The Long Tail)
(now Dion Hinchcliffe shows http://www.widgetbox.com)
Being everywhere…
- Mobile devices are one of the fastes growing segments of Internet traffic
- The best online products and services consist of complex constellations of hardware and software devices (iTunes, Sony CONNECT, Zune Marketplace)
Vertical or Horizontal?
… (sorry, he’s sooo fast)
The model of the Blogoshphere
- A tow-way Web platform
- User generated content
- Software above the level of a single device
- The Long Tail of content
- Architecture of Participation
- Emergent Structure
One upping the "page" metaphor
- The traditional Web page model has great value but is limited in the experience it offers
Can be very visually disruptive (page loading / reload syndrome), doesn’t compete well with desktop software, can’t do video or audio by itself - New models have emerged that profice a way to deliver apps as good as the desktop but entirely inside the browser via a URL
Rich User experience
Once loading the page, then …
Dion Hinchcliffe shows OpenLasylo.org
Challenges of RIAs
- Loss of page views
- RIA content is non-crawlable, posing serious challenges with SEO
- Few GUI conventions for RIAs
- The granular link structure of the Web can be lost
- Breaking the browser model (bookmarks, back button, …)
- Testing can be a major challenge
Software that gets smarter the more that people use it (Harnessing Collective Intelligence)
- Example : XM Radio is a satellite radio provider that has recently embraced some of the tenets of Product Develoopment 2.0
- Top 20 on 20 is now one of the most popular music channels on XM. According to XM’s internal research, the channel achieves 1.8 million listeners a week.
- Example: General Motors Chevy Apprentice Campaign
- Two-way collaborative video production effort between customers and corporate
- Over 22,000 videos were ultimately submitted
- Including submissions highliy critical of the Chevy Tahoe SUV
- GM anticipated this and only removed offensive videos
- Established trust with existing and potential customers
- Increased general awareness about the product
- All this wouldn’t have happened otherwise
Put another way:
Building applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them.
(Tim O’Reilly)
Providing an architecture of participation inside your network applicaitons to enable value to accumulate during user interaction (User generated content, Database of intensions)
Network Effects + Harnessing Collective Intelligence = Arcitecture of Participation: Moving to the Center of Software Design
Web 2.0 applied successfully: A pronounced "gravitational" effect
- Software that gets smarter the more people use it
- And/Or Benefits
- "Wisdom of Crowds"
- Collaboration
- Blind Data Sharing
- Community
- Fabric of Weg
- realized network potential
- deepening network effect
- user contributions
=> Collective intelligence
Next Generation Successes
- The story of Open source:
Sourceforge.org - The story of user contributions:
Wikipedia.org
Dion Hinchcliffe edited the "Web 2.0" page and corrected the year 2004 (invention of Web 2.0) to "1789" - The story of peer production:
Digg - The story of social interaction:
MySpace - The story of the tow-way Web in the large:
blogosphere ( that’s me :-) )
Blogs
- Fundamental two-way Web 2.0 platform
- Reverse chronological diary of entries
- Must allow comments (or it’s not a blog)
- has a machine readable feed (RSS/ATOM)
- Easy and cheap (free) to create and use
- Hundreds of blogging platforms, tens of millions blogging
- Essentially zero blogs in 2003, 57 million today
The story of KatrinaList
Hurricane Katrina
- Survivors emerged and announced where they were on their blogs
- People watching the Web’s syndication "ecosystem" noticed the reports
- A small group collected the reports out of the blogosphere and centralized the listing
- Over 50,000 survivor reports in the first 3 days after the disaster
- Emergent phenomenon
… and other examples.
Wikis (editable Web pages)
- Web pages anyone can edit
- Created by Ward Cunningham in 1995
- Essential feature: one button
- User does not have to know HTML
- Can link to anywhere on the Web
- A version of every change made is saved
- Very open, often the page can be edited by everyone
The Essential Web 2.0 Ground Rules
(entries shortened)
- Ease of Use
- Open up your content and services
- Aggressively add feedback loops
- Continuous release cycles
- Make your users part of your products
- Turning Applicaitons Into Platforms
- Warning: Don’t create soical communities just to have them. They aren’t a checklist item. But do empower inspired users to create them
That’s it. Questions?
