guest blogger Scott Rafer: Web 2.0

Scott Rafer is CEO of WINKsite.com and advisor to iUpload, Dogster, MyBlogLog, Delight, Digital Railroad and a couple other exploiters of the X in AJAX. Scott’s been helping Internet users find "What’s Right Now!" since 1998. He was most recently CEO of Feedster, the blog search engine and advertising network. Before Feedster, Scott co-founded WiFinder, the Wi-Fi hotspot directory; Fresher Information, a real-time search engine; and FotoNation, a creator of connected photography solutions. Before the dotcom boom, Rafer led the Internet products group at Kodak Hollywood, worked in investment banking at Needham & Company, and graduated from the Management of Technology program at UPenn. You can find Scott's blog at http://rafer.wirelessink.com. [you can also listen to this post]

It’s wonderful how we sophisticated web users revert so quickly to the behavior of three year olds at a birthday party. We are given all these wonderful toys and yet we play with the boxes and the wrapping paper. Web 2.0 is exactly like that, with all the hype about AJAX aka “Asynchronous JavaScript And XML.” All the hype is about the cool, new Javascript interfaces like Google Maps but almost all the value is in the XML.

Look at the new consumer Internet businesses that produce revenue and profits; they do not offer the dynamic user interface components getting all the attention. Taken solely from a user interface perspective, these sites are strictly Web 1.0. In a number of cases, they are downright ugly. The most obvious example on all these counts is MySpace. The parts of the site that MySpace designs itself are Spartan at best. It’s the parts of the site that MySpace users build that are the key to their success, and those are very Web 2.0-like in the way I’m focusing on. MySpace users assemble, disassemble, ruin, or outsource the design of their pages at will.

What is new about applications like MySpace, Skype, Flickr, Del.icio.us, as well as many portions of Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, is the that plumbing underlying these sites has changed rapidly over the last few years. Web sites used to be standalone systems that were effectively impossible to integrate. Now, services can be combined casually, quickly, and even temporarily if business conditions dictate. That’s what the geeks mean when they speak of mashups. The difference is the broad use of XML, but what the heck does that mean?

The Wikipedia definition of XML is far too precise to be useful, but it contains these two important sentences:

XML contrasts with HTML, which has an inflexible, single-purpose vocabulary of elements and attributes that, in general, cannot be repurposed. With XML, it is much easier to write software that accesses the document's information, since the data structures are expressed in a formal, relatively simple way.

In short, XML does the logical thing. It allows programmers to separate information from the way that information is
stored and used. Digital music is an appropriate metaphor. When audiocassette recorders became in the 1970s, suddenly you could have your favorite band on-demand in the car and in your Walkman. With the rise of the MP3 standard, even those limits are erased. Music can be easily stored all over the Internet, moved on and off audio players from hundreds of manufacturers, and syndicated as podcasts. As XML becomes universally applied over the next decade, all digital information and most of the applications that manipulate it become as flexible and transportable as every song on your iPod. The implications of” XML everywhere” are as tough to grasp here in early 2006 as the implications of music stored on computer hard drives were to grasp a decade ago.

If that were not enough, I think we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg in terms of near-term user interface changes. The Web is really going to get fun late this year because the Browser Wars are back. Microsoft's browser monopoly was broken over the past eighteen months by the open-source Firefox browser. Yahoo, Google, AOL, and others have all supported the Firefox team's efforts against Microsoft, and the effort paid off in terms of user choice and innovation.

So far, Firefox’s benefits appear to mainly be in the areas of security, spyware, and adware, but we’re about to be pleasantly swamped by XML integration into the browser. The end-user XML phenomenon has focused on RSS, a particular and rather limited form of XML. Many avid blog readers have taken to reading RSS directly using standalone RSS aggregators or the RSS functionality embedded in MyYahoo! and similar portal applications. With the upcoming releases of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and a Firefox 2.0, that RSS functionality is going to start disappearing into the browser. That’s when the power and flexibility of XML will be within reach of all our fingertips.

Comments

[Paul Evans]

Scott / Robin,

I think this covers a large part of Web 2.0 in a very concise way. I'm not sure what Scott means when he talks about RSS functionality disappearing into the browser - I use the Sage plug-in to Firefox, and that offers RSS functionality as a browser sitebar, and very satisfying it is too. I suspect that he means that the RSS reader won't be an optional extra on the next version of Firefox?

I know that there are as many definitions of Web 2.0 as there are people talking about it, but ... well, here's my ha'porth.

I think that the definition here excludes the notion of the 'semantic web' - a significant element of what we mean when we talk about W2.0. The way that we can cross-reference information in order to apply our own layers of meaning to other people's information. In it's most primitive form, the way that Outlook handles scheduling or task allocation - I can arrange an meeting with a colleague by interrogating his / her calender, seeing what appointments they have, working out whether my proposed meeting is more important to them than the routine task that they have already scheduled for themselves, and so on. Or the reputational system in e-bay. My ability to know that the person who is flogging me a Widget for £10 is probably going to deliver it - and is likely to replace it if it goes wrong - based upon the way that other people have reported similar transactions.

I know that both of these features were around when the kind of applications that people talk about in the context of Web 2.0 were (still are?) in their infancy, but I suspect that the ability that we have to take other people's information and strip some of it's context from it will result in more work being done on ways that we apply our own context to it by way of replacement and improvement. And this is always going to involve more people being content providers than beforehand. Which means that an important part of Web 2.0 is the way that we (as early adopters) evangelise and bring new people into the realm of content provision of one kind or another.