Web 2.0

By Dino KarabegIfi, UiO

Dino Karabeg, OMS Group, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo

Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. (This is what I’ve elsewhere called ‘harnessing collective intelligence.’). Tim O’Reilly

Lecture plan

WEB 2.0 INTRODUCTION

• Re-thinking the Internet

• Web 2.0 meme map

• Trend setters: Google, Wikipedia and others

• Beyond technology

WEB 2.0 LEARNING RESOURCES

• G. Vossen and S. Hageman: Unleshing Web 2.0 - From Concepts to Creativity

• T. Winograd and F. Flores: Understanding Computers and Cognition

• Toby Segaran: Programming Collective Intelligence

• Web 2.0 Compendium map

Some trend setters

Success story 1

The central principle behind the success of the giants born in the web 1.0 era who have survived to lead the Web 2.0 era appears to be this, that they have embraced the power of the web to harness collective intelligence.

Tim O’Reilly

Dino Karabeg, OMS Group, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo

The long tail

An Amazon employee described the Long Tail as follows: "We sold more books today that didn't sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday.".

(Wikipedia)

Perpetual beta

Users must be treated as co-developers, in a reflection of open source development practices (even if the software in question is unlikely to be released under an open source license.) The open source dictum, "release early and release often" in fact has morphed into an even more radical position, "the perpetual beta," in which the product is developed in the open, with new features slipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis. It's no accident that services such as Gmail, Google Maps, Flickr, del.icio.us, and the like may be expected to bear a "Beta" logo for years at a time.“

(Tim O’Reilly)

Success story 2

A few thousand years ago there was a marketplace. Never mind where. Traders returned from far seas with spices, silks, and precious, magical stones. Caravans arrived across burning deserts bringing dates and figs, snakes, parrots, monkeys, strange music, stranger tales. The marketplace was the heart of the city, the kernel, the hub, the omphalos. (…)[People] went there to look and listen and to marvel, to buy and be amused. But mostly they went to meet each other. And to talk. (…)In the market, language grew. Became bolder, more sophisticated. (…)

Markets are conversations. Trade routes pave the storylines. Across the millennia in between, the human voice is the music we have always listened for, and still best understand. (…)

So what went wrong? (…) Commerce is a natural part of human life, but it has become increasingly unnatural over the intervening centuries, incrementally divorcing itself from the people on whom it most depends, whether workers or customers. (…) the result has been to interpose a vast chasm between buyers and sellers.

By our own lifetimes, mass production and mass media had totally transformed this relationship, which came to be characterized by alienation and mystery. (…)

Enter the Internet (…) However, most "e-commerce" plays today look a lot like General Motors circa 1969 — looking for that next lucrative mass market just when markets have shattered into a million mirror-shard constituencies, many asking for something altogether different from the mindless razzle-dazzle of the tube. (…). TV with a buy button! Wowee! (…)

Knowledge worth having comes from turned-on volitional attention, not from slavishly following someone else's orders. Innovation based on such knowledge is exciting, inflammatory, even "dangerous," because it tends to challenge fixed procedures and inflexible policies. (…)

The broadcast mentality isn't dead by any means. It's just become suicidal. (…)In contrast, the Internet invites participation. It is genuinely empowering, well beyond the cliché that word has become. (…)

In a networked market, the best way for a company to "advertise" will be to provide a public window on its intranet. Instead of putting up slick images of what they'd like people to believe, corporations will open up so people can see what's really going on.

(Christopher Locke: Internet Apocalypso. In C. Locke at al.: Cluetrain Manifesto.)

Cultural underpinnings

Christopher Locke

Dino Karabeg, OMS Group, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo

Thanks!