Web 2.0 Expo 2008
By John Latta, WAVE
0807 7/11/08
San Francisco, CA
April 23-25, 2008
It is different. The WAVE was here last year and there was excitement in the air. This year the crowds are overwhelming and the exhibit area much larger and packed. One major change has happened – the emergence of social platforms. Opportunity is in the air. An ecosystem is forming to make money. But more important Web 2.0 has become mainstream. Tim O’Reilly spoke of enterprise adoption. Mashups in corporations are old news. Cloud computing, started by Amazon as a service, is everywhere. Compute by the second and storage by the byte is going mainstream. Tim O’Reilly predicted we are on the threshold of Ambient Computing.
Last week the WAVE was at NAB. This was like herding dinosaurs who just did not know what was happening. Here at Web 2.0 Expo no one knows what is happening either. But this crowd thrives on change and challenge. Excitement is created by growth which was only last seen with Internet 1.0. With the Internet taken for granted Web 2.0 is beginning to impact lives and what individuals do on a daily basis. It is social and personal.
Groundswell
Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, Forrester Research gave the most reasoned assessment of the need to rationally assess the value of Web 2.0 technologies in business. Key points include.
Recent research has shown that 51% of the Global 2000 companies are buying Web 2.0 tools in 2008 and another 12% are considering it.
The premise of Groundswell is that it is:
A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations.
In a business context individuals assess Web 2.0 on a scale which ranges from Corporatist to Pragmatist to Purist. The Corporatist says that online activities must delivery business benefits, while the Pragmatist says that People are in charge, but corporations can benefit. The last, the Purist, sees people as the most powerful force on the Net.
To be successful in adopting Web 2.0 technologies a corporation must be able to see all three views.
Using a classic business view, Forrester regards Objectives as the key to successfully using a social strategy in its business.
For a company to participate in Groundswell it needs a 4 part approach called POST. This has these components.
People – assess your customers’ social activities.
Objectives – Decide what you want to accomplish
Strategy – Plan for how relationships with customers will change
Technology – Decide on which social technologies to use
Forrester made it very clear that the technology should be last. Only consider what technology to use once the three above have been evaluated.
Forrester presented a Social Technographics Ladder. This examined where customers fit on a social scale. The parts of the ladder from top to bottom are:
Creators
Critics
Collectors
Joiners
Spectators
Inactives
Each category was evaluated in terms of the social Web 2.0 activities of its class members.
The activities within corporations were mapped into Groundswell objectives. This mapping included:
Research to Listening
Marketing to Talking
Sales to Energizing
Support to Supporting
Development to Embracing
Examples were given on how the use of the Groundswell principles had impacted corporations.
Del Monte created a new product for dog lovers
P&G connected with young girls on the sensitive subject of tampons
Brides.com energizes young brides in myspace
BestBuy uses a blog for employees to communicate internally
Starbucks connects with consumers for new product and store ideas
An ROI was presented on the creation of an executive blog. This was used as an illustration of how to present and assess the issues of a customer facing corporate blog.
In summary, Forrester defined the success for business use of Web 2.0 as:
Being by first understand your customers (many companies just do not even know this)
Choose an objective to be accomplished
Line up executive backing
Romance the naysayers
Start small and think big
Clay Shirky
Clay Shirky, Adjunct Professor, New York University, has recently published a book Here Comes Everybody. He gave a brief talk which was very thought provoking.
In the transition from the agrarian society to the industrial society one of the most important
components was gin. The pace of change was so radical that gin became the means for society to cope. It took 30 years before the institutions of industrial revolution we recognize came into being. This happened only after society was able to cope with and assimilate the changes which happened.
In the 20th Century the social lubricant was the sitcom. This occurred with the rise of the 5 day work week and creation of the middle class. As a society we had too much free time. This was filled with TV. Desperate Housewives was gin of our times. Only now are we starting to see cognitive excess as a plus
Where do we now find time which can be used creatively by society? Now it is being placed in TV. We should ask the questions what should be done with this time? The issue is that TV has masked for 50 years the great surplus of human time. For example, Wikipedia has taken 100 million hours of human thought. TV is consuming 200 billion hours every year. This equates to 2000 Wikipedia projects a year if television watch was turned to more creative uses. For example as a society we spend 100 million hours each weekend just to watch the ads. The available time is called the cognitive surplus.
So a Wikipedia measure is only a small portion of surplus of time which is available. The question posed is how do we as a society figure out what to do with the surplus of time. No one has any idea of how to deploy it. Early phase activities are all special cases. We just do not understand how time consumption all fits. We cannot predict what the outcome would be because of complexity.
Social participation is better online than to passively watch television. Media does not understand the difference. Traditional media only measures consumption. It misses the point that people also like to produce and to share.
This cognitive surplus is so large. If only 10% is carved out for producing and sharing this would result in 10,000 Wikipedia projects a year.
Is it a fad? Will public participation go away? This is a shift closer to industrial revolution. Society is not growing out of this, it is growing into it.
Let me provide a story. A 4 year old looking was watching television. It got up during the program and went behind the television screen. What are you doing? The response was “I am looking for the mouse.” Screens that ship without a mouse are shipped broken.
Media is more than just consuming. It is about producing and sharing. It is also about how to get a hold of this massive cognitive surplus.
Bottom line.
The web provides a way for everyone to make huge contributions of information and ideas to the rest of the world. The key is turning to use the vast amounts of brain cycles, or cognitive surplus, which is being wasted on watching pointless television shows.
Web technology today has made it possible to make creative use of an individual’s time. Even if we each only devote a small portion of our free time to participatory activity, the benefits are staggering.
Consider how much the world has and will benefit from global human endeavors like Wikipedia and then think about how 2,000 more projects of that magnitude and effort could also have been created this year.
Yahoo OS
Art Balogh, CTO, laid out the open platform strategy embraced by Yahoo OS. This includes the following.
The scope of changing Yahoo was illustrated with its numbers:
500M+ unique users/month
120B page views/month
235B user minutes/month
10B user relationships
Flickr API is the #2 used API
1.1B YUI files served/week
Introduced today is the Monkey. – the search API which allows 3rd parties to add value to Yahoo search results. A location based search was shown.
Yahoo is standardizing the page views across all the properties.
Mail is being made so that 3rd parties can add functionality.
Even the home page can be extended by 3rd parties.
The open platform can apply to Yahoo use on mobile devices.
Yahoo will still preserve individual privacy and the ability of users to select what extensions to use.
At the same time all these changes are being made Yahoo is being made more social. Every aspect has a social dimension.
In interviews following the keynote Yahoo expanded on the announcement:
Y!OS is expected to have impact on Yahoo's page growth and time spent on the site, as well as revenue. Over three years they expect an increase of operating cash flow from $1.9 billion to $3.7billion.
Y!Open will be released at some unspecified time later this year, and include a development environment for its key properties, a social "activator" and graph engine, an events engine, and a single profile for users.
The activator engine handles the combining of different relationship groupings, such as the Yahoo Mail e-mail address book, Yahoo Messenger contacts, Flickr friends, Yahoo 360, and Yahoo Mash.
MySpace
Steve Pearman, MySpace vice president of product strategy, discussed the scope of MySpace and its new gallery.
The number of individuals on MySpace is less than the population of Japan but more than the population of Mexico.
There more than 100B rows of data, 85Gb/s of bandwidth used, 50m messages a day, 17% of the online minutes in the US are spent a MySpace and 200,000 to 400,000 new users sign up daily.
The MySpace Application Gallery, will have more than 1,000 new applications that its users can add to their profiles.
The MySpace home page will feature an application gallery icon at the top of the page so users can easily see it. This will provide one-click access to the gallery from their home pages through individual "control panels." MySpace will launch a page to highlight featured applications.
Open Platforms
David Recordon provided an overview of the Open Platform movement.
The trip function for the Open social platform was the facebook announcement a year ago. This has caused nearly all the platforms to adopt some form of openness.
One result has been that the adoption of open has become a pathway to VC funding.
For an open platform strategy to work it needs:
Ways to share information
Ways to communicate with people
Ways to know who someone is
Ways to know who someone knows.
On the privacy front significant progress was made in the last year and OAUTH seems to be gaining increased adoption.
In the IM wars Jabber/XMPP is making progress towards interoperability. AOL has stated it will support Jabber.
On the ability to link social accounts the Microformat XFN is also making progress.
Sun
Jonathan Schwartz, CEO, Sun discussed many topics during his interview with Tim O’Reilly.
Schwartz stated that free software and free ideas are the best way to reach the marketplace.
The MySQL deal is closed and integration is going well. Just because the software is free does not mean there is not value. The company is growing and was to IPO. Sun will expand the market building on the downloads.
We get 70,000 opportunities a day to introduce them to the infrastructure that could provide an online backup for MySQL. MySQL is a financial asset that is growing like a weed. Sun will be able to amplify its Linux database assets success as the industry's focus shifts toward cloud computing.
MySQL is widely perceived as evidence of how open source software can lead to great commercial opportunities. He said that in a recent meeting with many top CIOs they were unaware of how many in their company were downloading the software. Schwartz checked on the number of downloads in advance, and reported to the CIOs what was happening in their companies, i.e., MySQL downloads. It was far greater than the CIOs realized.
MySQL has secured a $10m deal with a global technology company.
Sun is talking with Linus Torvalds to see if ZFS, the dynamic file system in Solaris, can be released under GPL. It is already open source.
Historically, communication took place by being a celebrity CEO who met with heads of state, and got the local media to cover it. You got the message out in an inefficient and environmentally irresponsible way. Then the Internet came round and gave you a way to reach the entire planet.
Schwartz is credited with showing how the corporate blog can be used as a tool to reach customers, employees, and others. Communicating is one of my key jobs. But pretty soon the novelty of the blog will subside. Blogging will become an anachronism.
Most terrifying day happened, not when I used blogging, but when the General Counsel decided to write a blog. This turned out to be really good as other general counsels liked it.
Schwartz does not think he has terrified anyone but the securities group within Sun. That is being assured of SEC compliance of forward looking statements – safe harbor.
The rest of the executives in the world will catch up with the use of blogging.
If you say undifferentiated things that are expected, then you shouldn't expect anyone to care. Schwartz elaborated that controversy was...not a byproduct of the strategy--it was the strategy.
Open source strategy is connecting with the cloud strategy. The goal is about delivering value, not how that value is delivered. You have to reach out to the market with an asset, which will draw them into the network (cloud).
Blogs and open-source software are complementary.
Sun distributes 50m Java runtimes a month
Sun is working towards everything being virtualized.
Social networking and high performance computing markets are growing like weeds now within the enterprise. That’s because Moore’s Law is making CPUs so inexpensive, which in turn allows small social networks to start small and grow large. Aggregate Knowledge, is an example, which has an Amazon-like recommendation technology that shows consumers on a site “people who bought this also bought that.” Aggregate Knowledge needs larger and larger scale SMP machines because their databases are growing huge.
Schwartz stated that people have the impression that Google runs on simple one-core Intel-based computers whereas the average “node” on servers in the data centers are now hefty four-core machines that run multiple threads. That’s much more like the kind of machine that Sun makes rather than generic Intel-based server vendors. There is no doubt in my mind that the market will come back in Sun’s direction. That is, powerful computers with lots of cores running lots of threads with efficient power consumption.
I was with the largest IT spenders a while ago and asked them if they were responsible for their power bills. Only half raised their hands. But power is the No. 2 cost in a data center next to people.
Power consumption of computing has already become very important – green computing. In Japan it costs more to run a server than to buy it. Being green at Sun is being competitive. For example, 1/5 of all energy is just to move air around in data centers.
Sun has “greened its infrastructure” by designing chips which are more power efficient. Niagara, the chip platform that implemented this strategy with many cores on one chip, went from zero to $1 billion run rate in 18 months.
The Sun black box is a data center in a shipping container. This supports emergency deployments and can easily be moved around. These are 1/3 more efficient that an equivalent data center.
Schwartz commented that I would agree with you, the network is the computer, but data is the currency.
Tim O’Reilly
Tim O’Reilly gave the first keynote. Some of his points included.
We’re making a change in the world.
The Internet is becoming a global platform, everything connected, and the nature of that platform is this amazing tool for harnessing collective intelligence. It's not just about participation but we are literally building a platform to make the world smarter, to make businesses smarter, to make ourselves smarter. This is an amazing revolution in human augmentation. We're at a turning point akin to literacy, or the formation of cities. This is a huge change in the way the world works. We have a long way to go and a lot to discover.
For those who think his rhetoric is a bit strong, I would add a comparison I’ve made before: The ancient Great Library of Alexandria. More than a repository of knowledge, it was a place for the great thinkers of the age, about 300 BCE to the year zero, to come and study, experiment, write and change the world.
Just as the need for organizing all the world’s information provided the impetus for new inventions – including the process of alphabetizing scrolls, the invention of the dictionary, the bibliography and the Greek grammar, which became the basis for the later invention of the Latin Grammar – the Internet necessitated the invention of the Google search engine.
And we all became smarter. The Library of Alexandria was created by the Ptolemy clan. Ptolemy I was a general of Alexander the Great, who conquered Egypt and much of the rest of the civilized world and then died, leaving the spoils to his general to divide up. So great works were translated into Greek, the works of the great Greek writers and philosophers were collected, the Greek language spread throughout Europe and the Middle East, and the Hellenic Age began. Its influence is with us today. A translation of the Torah into Greek is even believed to be the document that Jesus used to spread his religion to a mostly Greek speaking world.
The Ptolemy’s, like Alexander, were idealists. The intent was to spread knowledge and Greek culture, and it worked. Parts of Alexandria were open to the public, making it the first public library, as well as the greatest library the world saw until the spread of the internet.
Google is like a large bank. Both are massive data centers. But only Google gives you services against the data, including the data collected about you. The bank mines our data in the back office but keeps it to itself. Enterprise 2.0 will be about companies letting users into their back office and turning companies inside out. Give us the chance to learn from our data.
We are entering the world of ambient computing, as everything is wired into the Internet. We are in a soup of computing. Web 2.0 is all around us.
Web 2.0, with technologies such as wikis, blogs, tags, social networks, and collective intelligence, is maturing. A sign is the number of enterprise companies on the floor including IBM and Oracle. There is real money to be made by developing Web 2.0 products for enterprises. Harnessing collective intelligence can lead to the promised land of profits.
The maturing of Web 2.0 and cloud computing, the move to the Internet as a platform, has problems. The market values centralization and consolidation. It values big winners who can dominate a market. But this could lead us back to the world of large, centralized players like Oracle and Microsoft, which could stifle innovation and openness.
The paradox is that applications built on open, decentralized networks are leading to new concentrations of power, such as, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others. We need to build an interoperability layer to reduce the harmful effects of having a few companies with enormous power and leverage.
Just making money on Web 2.0 or acknowledging the transformative powers of the Internet is insufficient. We need to have big goals, such as making governments responsive to citizens and building a global immune system through Internet-based efforts. It's not always about the money or augmenting human intelligence.
The Internet is important and revolutionary, and harvesting collective intelligence is core to Web 2.0 and a way to make more money.
From the Floor
Photobucket
This photo and video sharing site announced APIs which allow users to access their content from places outside of Photobucket. This can include: web sites, web applications, desktop applications, browser plug-ins, mobile phones, home entertainment systems and digital photo frames. The APIs support the following:
Secure log in to Photobucket accounts
Create, edit and access accounts
Upload new content (photos or video)
Share content via e-mail
Search public content on Photobucket
Access and update metadata.
GoGrid
GoGrid offers on-demand Internet infrastructure. Using a model based on RAM GB hour usage and data transfer it is possible to scale usage based on need. Servers can be deployed instantly and resources allocated dynamically while only paying for what is used. Part of the control is based on a multi-server control panel operated by the administrator.
Bungeeconnect
Bungee Connect offers what they call PAAS (Platform as a Service). This is cloud based environment which supports the life cycle of web environments. It supports: development, testing, deploying and hosting web applications. There is no software downloads or installation required.
WAVE Comments
There has been a major shift since last year’s Web 2.0 – the emergence of open platforms in social networking. Google’s OpenSocial is being supported by a number of players. The Yahoo Open OS is a major move and they are integrating social attributes into the OS. But this is only a beginning. A platform is an ecosystem. An ecosystem has many parts and increasingly a web of interrelated activities and relationships. It is still too early to see this in Web 2.0. Again Tim O’Reilly is right – much lies ahead. One of the key points made by Tim and others is that data plays a central role in making these platforms useful. Cited a number of times was Aggregate Knowledge. Another was Spinscape. It takes massive compute power to harness these resources. Thus, the Web 2.0 platform notion is beginning to form. It goes well beyond the Internet and based, in part, on the direct involvement of individuals. Tim also mentioned ambient computing and the presentation by Dash was an example of the power of the Internet as a platform to support mass connectivity. Certainly a part of the Sun discussion was cloud computing and how this supports its business. Again at this Web 2.0 we saw more examples of cloud computing, for example, Bungeeconnect. There is a transition in place and an important change is in process.
.Return to the top of the page
|
