Web 2.0: Process

The third aspect of Web 2.0, which is often under-appre­ci­ated, is the pro­cess aspect. This has changed people’s expect­a­tions of what soft­ware can do, and how it should be delivered. This cat­egory includes open source, con­tinu­al beta and quick release cycles, and some new busi­ness models.

Pro­cess Cloud

Not all of the things that are import­ant in Web 2.0 are new, of course. Open Source soft­ware has been around for a long time, but I would argue that it has nev­er been as pop­u­lar as now, where more people have the abil­ity to con­trib­ute their time and tal­ent to pro­jects for which they’re not dir­ectly paid (unless they’re lucky enough to work for a com­pany that sup­ports such projects). 

The con­cepts of con­tinu­al beta and quick release cycles are new though. It was­n’t that long ago that you could only buy con­sumer-level soft­ware in boxes with pretty pic­tures and prin­ted manu­als, either in stores or by call­ing com­pan­ies. For expens­ive soft­ware that needed con­sult­ing ser­vices to install and con­fig­ure sales reps would vis­it if you worked for a large enough com­pany. To take part in a beta pro­gram you needed to know someone who worked in the com­pany and sign an NDA, and it was a small, tightly-con­trolled circle.

These days the Web 2.0 browser-based applic­a­tions don’t need hand-hold­ing to install and con­fig­ure, so the serv­er load is the big con­straint on how many people can take part at once. There are sev­er­al fla­vours of beta pro­grams: invite some “thought lead­ers” and ask them to invite their friends in the hope they’ll blog a lot about it (Gmail did this, you got 6 invites, then 50, then you could invite 250 of your closest friends to take part, most of whom already had gmail accounts); unlim­ited invites start­ing with a small circle; sign up on a wait­ing list; allow in any­one from cer­tain com­pan­ies (dopplr does this, with the twist that the mem­bers can then invite any­one they like).

The “con­tinu­al beta” bit comes from the fact that these applic­a­tions are updated quickly; these updates are often tried out on some of the users before being rolled out to all. Flickr appar­ently had hun­dreds of incre­ment­al releases in 18 months from Feb­ru­ary 2004 to Octo­ber 2005 (stated in O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Prin­ciples and Best Prac­tices; I could­n’t find an online ref­er­ence oth­er than that report). The line between a beta and a non-beta applic­a­tion seems to be a fine one; the only dis­tinc­tion in many cases that the user can see is the word “beta” on the web site. Con­tinu­al releases give users a reas­on to come back often, new fea­tures can be tested and fixed quickly. Of course, this sort of sys­tem does­n’t really work for fun­da­ment­al soft­ware such as oper­at­ing sys­tems, data­bases, browsers, iden­tity pro­viders, and dir­ect­ory ser­vices, where you want full-on secur­ity and regres­sion test­ing, but it does work for the Web 2.0 applic­a­tions that run on those bits of fun­da­ment­al software.

And in keep­ing with the user-cre­ated ten­ets of Web 2.0, plat­forms such as Face­book that enable third-party developers to write applic­a­tions to run on that plat­form also ful­fill the func­tion of con­tinu­ally adding fea­tures to the applic­a­tion without the own­ers need­ing to code any­thing, or pay people to add fea­tures. The users do it all for them — use the plat­form, add fea­tures to the plat­form, mar­ket their added fea­tures. The own­ers sup­ply the hard­ware and the basic infra­struc­ture (which needs to be stable and reli­able) and the users do the rest. At least, that’s the the­ory and the hope.

Which brings us to the busi­ness mod­els. How do people pay for the hard­ware, soft­ware, pro­gram­mers, mar­ket­ing? There are a num­ber of ways in which Web 2.0 com­pan­ies try to cov­er the bills for long enough to sur­vive until they can be acquired by some big­ger com­pany. One is advert­ising. Google and its com­pet­it­ors have made it easy for even small web sites, such as blog­gers in the long tail, to make some money from ads. It’s more than enough to pay the bills for some sites, since it’s now cheap or free to build and launch a site. Some sites are free when you watch the ads, but you can pay for an ad-free ver­sion. Or free for private use, but cost some­thing for com­mer­cial use. And then there’s the vari­ant where a basic account is free, but you have to pay if you want more fea­tures, such as upload­ing files, or upload­ing more than a cer­tain num­ber of pho­tos. A vari­ant for open source soft­ware is that the soft­ware is free, but you need to pay for sup­port or real help in con­fig­ur­ing it, or to get new releases more quickly.

One of a series on Web 2.0, taken from my talk at the CSW Sum­mer School in July 2007. Here’s the series intro­duc­tion. Com­ing up next: some issues with Web 2.0