web 2.0

A popular joke of the 21st century has been that the Web is "ruled" by teenagers. That saying may be a joke, but the truth is: we live in an era in which a self-organized group of college students, without any funding can take on global organizations like HSBC.

How come?

Because large organizations are too damned SLOW! Web is extremely fast-paced and the large bureaucratic beasts are often just way too late to the party.

To give couple examples:

1) In most organizations people who can quickly react to an emerging topic, on the Web, concerning the organization, are not allowed to. The messages "have to go through proper channels" and channels take time.

Solution: either remove the channels or make sure they do not take so much time. Can you achieve 10-minute turnaround? If not - relax the preemptive oversight. Educate your employes of what's acceptable and what is not. Let them take initiatives of engaging in the conversations on the Web, let them make mistakes (they will make some), make sure they learn from those.

2) Use agile technologies. Forget about "enterprise" this and that. Forget about IBM. Use what is already available: Facebook, Linkedin, Youtube, GoogleMaps etc. For the part you need to build, use Drupal, WordPress, DJango, RubyOnRails. Use technologies that can give you results QUICKLY.

I've been a Java architect long enough and I know enterprise Java technologies well-enough to allow myself say this: most organizations that build websites in Java (or any other heavy-weight technology like that) are just wasting their time. Java is great and there are many incredible things you can build with it if you are an Internet backbone company like Verisign, but Java is not for your blogging needs or even for your website of average complexity.

Be responsive, be quick, be agile. Worn-out phrase or not, I will repeat this: please, please, do not be afraid to make mistakes.

I woke up feeling a little prophet-ish this morning. I would bet you money, but it is illegal, so I am just going to say: I know what the next big service thing from Google should will be! Ready? It's a free SMS gateway that allows sending SMS messages through an open API.

Now think about it. Text-messaging ("SMSing") has been hot for a while now. Marketing companies and individuals are already using it big time. Text-messaging is expensive, though. Many little startups, with little, but interesting pilot sites just can not afford it. How is the industry going to innovate, if the innovators can not afford the tools?

There's a lot of data transmitted over text-messages and it could be even more interesting than the data you find in emails. Text-messages typically have less spam. If Google is willing to provide huge mailboxes for free, just for a chance to index e-mail text - they should be dying to get their hands on text-messages. If anything, Google is late to do it.

You say "privacy"? I say - yeah, like Google cares.

So, here it is - you should see something like it in the next 6 months. I give it a year tops.

David E. Williams, from the Health Business Blog recorded an interesting podcast with Dr. Jason Bhan, co-founder of Ozmosis.

Ozmosis is a social network for practicing physicians to share knowledge and communicate. Revolutionary in its nature, Ozmosis uses the rich experience of existing social networks, plus a proprietary "trust" technology, to create a breakthrough environment where physicians can quickly get answers and improve their knowledge.

Ozmosis was made possible by Drupal. Examples of Drupal usage that benefit public are numerous, but if I am not mistaken, this is the first major case of Drupal being used in Healthcare. It's great to see Drupal helping revolutionize the way things are done, especially in such an important area.

Listen to the podcast: [ http://www.healthbusinessblog.com/?p=1804 ]

Web 1.0: Global reach to content publishing.
Web 2.0: Web becomes a two-way publishing avenue: readers contribute content and play central role.
Web 3.0: Let's try make sense of the enormous content published. Smart aggregation becomes key.

It looks like the reality in which content aggregation plays equally important role, compared to publishing, is arriving quietly but steadily:

Image courtesy of Amazon Web Services Blog

P.S. Thanks to Doug for pointing to the blog post.

Nice and funny "analysis" of the Internet community on CreateDebate

Ok, finally Google is starting to make a move against Wikipedia, with the private launch of Google Knol. The specifics of the system are not yet known, but from what we can read between the lines, the interesting difference betwen Knol and Wikipedia is that in Knol content will be authored by a "group of experts" (that will later be able to share ad-revenue with Google for their efforts?).

If this is true, then clearly Google is responding to the long-standing joke (started in the TV show Office) that Wikipedia is reliable "because anybody can edit it". Google must be proud to "have gotten the message"... of all conservatives who refuse to accept Wikipedia.

Good job, Google! Nice swing from a progressive thinking away and into aligning with stagnating conservativism. So, Google does not believe in the Wisdom of Crowds, anymore? And here we thought the whole point James Surowiecki was making was that crowds are always smarter than a bunch of "experts". Ironic, how we are going back to "experts", is not it?

You, my friends, can make "Knols" (What the heck is this with Google people trying to come up with an alternative English, anyway?) as your "the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read.", but I am sticking with Wikipedia. Wiki has been the first entry into a new subject, for me, for a long time now and I am not complaining.

I think Google is just desperately reacting to the unfortunate reality that people now prefer to start research in Wikipedia rather than Google. Desperation is never a good adviros, though and Google seems to be missing the point.

I assess the chances of Knol's success somewhere near that of Google Video and Orkut.

*sigh*

Last week, the major news on the Web was the launch of OpenSocial. Google did an excellent job documenting APIs and publishing quick-start tutorials and videos, as well as signing-up an impressive group of early adopters. All that is left to us, the blogger by-standers, is to review, envy and criticize. That is exactly what we are going to do.

Since it's too early, I, personally have only a few, quick comments. These comments may be totally off, so I insist on the right to change my statement at-will. Nevertheless, the first impression of OpenSocial is highly positive. The API is clear, concise and pragmatic. Pragmatism and (at least an attempt of) parsimony are a necessary feature for such API. It seems like Google is on the right track on that front.

Some of our readership, coming from the Java/J2EE world, may draw parallels between OpenSocial and Java Portlets API (JSR-168). Java Portlets API was created about four years ago, intended to be a plugin infrastructure for Java-based web sites (a plan much less ambitious than that of OpenSocial) and - failed miserably. The main reason why it failed was that it was too restrictive in the areas that do not matter, and too general in the areas they should have described in detail. Areas like user profile management, user actions, user interactions. Basically, JSR-168 was page-centric, rather than user-centric and the demand is for a user-centric integration. Rendering is a job of a container.

OpenSocial has clearly avoided the trap that JSR-168 fell into. They concentrate on the right features: people, activities, persistence. The choice of the platform - Javascript, REST (bye-bye SOAP), Atom, RSS, HTML and CSS makes complete sense. The API is quite modular, reasonably high-level and what seems like flexible-enough to allow for all kinds of applications. We were shown some very different applications in the demos, created by different vendors.

Now that we have praised OpenSocial enough, and probably nobody had any doubt in its huge potential, anyway, let's mention some oddities, we've noticed:

Web these days is full of spam-bots, malicious crawlers and other "e-pests" that post junk-advertising all over the Net. These parasites give the most headache to blogs and social sites, where moderators want to free-up comments to general audience ("Two-Way Communication", eh?), but have no desire to promote illegal Viagra sales.

Captcha, or Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, is one of the most effective tools to fight evil machines with. Unfortunately, not all Captcha is equal. Many Captcha systems are vulnerable and have been hacked, rendered useless against all but the most primitive spamming.

reCAPTCHA is a service from Carnegie Mellon University. This service is a prime example of blending pleasant with useful in a very Web 2.0-ish way. reCAPTCHA provides a free, high-quality protection and at the same time helps digitize old books. Every time you use reCaptcha, you help digitize one word of a book that was written before the digital age. How much cooler can it get? Well, reCaptcha also provides enhanced accessibility through audio-Captchas. That one is not easy to "code" yourself, and I don't know of any other free service that offers it.

Great job, guys!

... or his campaign team does. Either way, when I logged into my Linkedin account yesterday and saw a banner spotlighting Barack Obama's participation in one of my interest groups, I could not help a "wow" reaction.

We have already blogged that 2008 Presidential campaign is being run in an unprecedentedly Web-savvy manner. Pretty much all candidates, in both parties, have a MySpace page and a bunch of YouTube videos, at the least. This may sound trivial now, but if you look back 4 years ago - the picture was quite different, was it not? The candidates have come a long way, but Barack's team is taking it a notch further. Whilst most candidates do suffice with the minimal - MySpace, YouTube, maybe FaceBook, the featured participation of Obama in a specific interest group on Linkedin is a great example of entering the conversation on the Web at the right spot.

Anybody who has ever applied to a US university has at least heard the name of the US News & World Report. Their website of the US educational institutions' rankings is the most comprehensive and authoritative one. To give you a flavor, the US News ranking for business schools is equally, or maybe even more recognized than the one from the Financial Times.

It was a pleasant news to find-out that the authoritative publication has expanded its ranking outreach into other areas as well. The recently launched US News Rankings and Reviews website [rankingsandreviews.com] is in public beta, right now, featuring only car reviews. One can assume, however, that this is just a first step and we should expect more from the reliable source.

Stay tuned.