Anyway

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

The social and col­lab­or­a­tion part of Web 2.0 mostly revolves around the con­cepts of social net­work­ing, user-gen­er­ated con­tent, and the long tail.

Social Cloud

Social net­work­ing is the idea that people can meet and talk and organ­ise their social lives using the Web instead of, or in addi­tion to, more tra­di­tion­al meth­ods such as talk­ing face to face, or on the phone. It’s an exten­sion of usen­et and bul­let­in boards that’s based on the web, with more fea­tures. Social net­work­ing sites tend to go through phases; every­one was into Orkut for a while, now it’s MySpace and Face­book, or Ravelry if you’re a knit­ter. Fea­tures and focus vary, but the idea of cre­at­ing an online com­munity remains the same.

User-gen­er­ated con­tent is the idea that non-pro­fes­sion­als can con­trib­ute con­tent. I don’t like the term much, so I’m going to use the vari­ant user-cre­ated con­tent to show that it’s a cre­at­ive pro­cess, not just some machine gen­er­at­ing con­tent. The concept of user-cre­ated con­tent isn’t new; the Web was first designed as a col­lab­or­a­tion plat­form, the read/write web. In prac­tic­al terms, how­ever, it was dif­fi­cult for those without lots of tech­nic­al know­ledge to pub­lish on the web. All these things like blog­ging and com­ment­ing that are now rel­at­ively easy for people to do wer­en’t, just a few years ago. Pre­vi­ously only a few people could make their opin­ions widely known, in prac­tice pro­fes­sion­als with access. Don’t for­get that one of the reas­ons Ben­jamin Frank­lin could make such a dif­fer­ence in the early years of the US was that he owned a print­ing press!

Now basic­ally every­one with access to the inter­net who’s inter­ested can pub­lish their opin­ions, their pho­tos, or their videos to their friends and the world. It’s easi­er to keep in touch with friends far away, or find out what life’s like in some far-off place, or con­trib­ute a snip­pet of know­ledge to Wiki­pe­dia. Some of these pub­lish­ers (blog­gers, com­menters, photo-upload­ers) have a large audi­ence, many have an audi­ence that is large enough for them (which may mean just the fam­ily, or just them­selves, or a few hun­dred strangers).

One of the down­sides of this “demo­crat­iz­a­tion”, as it’s some­times called, is that it can be hard to find the really good inform­a­tion or enter­tain­ment — you hear a lot about “cult of the ama­teur” and “90% of everything is crap”. Some of this is com­ing from those who are threatened by the avail­ab­il­ity of inform­a­tion from oth­er sources: journ­al­ists and news­pa­pers in par­tic­u­lar are right to be scared, since they’re now going to have to work harder to con­vince the world that they add value. Wheth­er the enter­tain­ment cre­ated by ama­teurs that’s avail­able on the web is bet­ter than that cre­ated by the mass enter­tain­ment industry depends on your view of how good a job the lat­ter does at find­ing and nur­tur­ing talent.

The long tail is anoth­er aspect of Web 2.0 that you hear about a lot. Book­sellers are a good example of how the long tail works: Where­as your aver­age book­seller, even Water­stones or Black­well’s, has maybe a few thou­sand or a few tens of thou­sands of books, an inter­net seller can have mil­lions. Although the com­par­is­on is per­haps not fair, since an inter­net book­seller, just like your loc­al book­seller, can order from the pub­lish­er and will usu­ally count that as being part of the invent­ory for brag­ging reas­ons. And, of course, you can always go to Pow­ell’s Books in Port­land, which claims to have over a mil­lion books phys­ic­ally in their store. It’s big; they hand out maps at the entrance so you don’t get lost.

The long-tail aspect is this: It turns out that most of the rev­en­ue does­n’t come from selling the Harry Pot­ter books, big sellers though those are, it’s from selling those books that aren’t indi­vidu­ally big sellers. The total volume of sales in those niche areas is lar­ger than the best-sellers. Oth­er com­pan­ies that make good use of this of course are eBay, where you can buy things that you can­’t get down­town, uptown, or poten­tially any­where in your town, and the video rent­al com­pany Net­flix, which rents out some 35,000 titles in the one mil­lion videos it sends out each day.

And, of course, the long tail applies to blogs and oth­er online sites. In oth­er words, no mat­ter how spe­cial­ised your blog is, someone out there in blog-read­ing land is likely to find it inter­est­ing. The big prob­lem is how those poten­tial read­ers find out about it.

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: tech­nic­al aspects of Web 2.0