heisel.org

Early Web 2.0 braindump

Thursday | April 24, 2008 | 7:05 pm  

I thought I’d take advan­tage of the slow Wednes­day after­noon to try and col­lalesce some thoughts from the first two days of the Web 2.0 Con­fer­ence

• There are a lot of suit-​types-​with-​PCs here (as opposed to geeks-​with-​macs). I’m guess­ing that means that the “enter­prise” is start­ing to pay atten­tion to all this stuff if they’re send­ing execs, prod­uct man­age­ment folks, etc.

• OpenID & OAuth are being talked about. A. Lot.

• OpenSo­cial is as well, to a lesser extent.

• Data Porta­bil­ity is on a lot of folks’ minds.

• It seems like a lot of folks are hoping that OpenID + OAuth + OpenSo­cial + Data Porta­bil­ity + As Yet Unknown Social Graph Provider == Face­book killer.

• The social web is broken. That is, unless you like re-​accounting, re-​friending, re-​profiling, re-​usernaming and re-​passwording with every site you go to.

• If you’re trying to con­vince your enter­prise to adopt social/Web 2.0 fea­tures, then get them a copy of Groundswell, it’s writ­ten by some folks from For­rester so it has that shiny veneer of expen­sive con­sult­ing. (I’m being a little too hard on them, they did have some good and inter­est­ing points and com­pelling data).

• Web 2.0 is a stupid term. How­ever, if it gets trans­lated as “talk with and then listen to your customers” then it might worth having yet-​another-​buzzword. Snarky com­ment: Uh, maybe I’m just in the wrong gen­er­a­tion, but why is this such a dif­fi­cult con­cept for com­pa­nies to grasp?

• Clay Shirky is a smart guy. (Clay, where’s the [RSS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format) at?). Tra­di­tional media will con­tinue to see a decline in usage as each new gen­er­a­tion of Inter­net users becomes more par­tic­i­pa­tive. If you don’t allow your con­sumers to become cre­ators, shar­ers and com­men­ta­tors of your con­tent, then watch out.

• Jonathan Zit­train is also a really smart guy. As com­put­ing moves into the cloud (can we come up with a better metaphor) there are some real and seri­ous legal issues to con­sider. If the gov­ern­ment or a mega-​corp doesn’t like your appli­ca­tion hosted on EC2/Google App Engine, what’s more likely: they help you in your legal battle to keep it alive -or- they sus­pend your account to avoid a costly lawsuit.

• The mobile Web is broken and is a bad idea. One Web, one set of stan­dards is the only way to have an even remote chance at repli­cat­ing the suc­cess of the “Desktop Web”.

• Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Face­book and others are to Web 2.0 what Microsoft was to Web 1.0 — they want you to develop on their plat­form and be locked into their API. Smart devel­op­ers will remem­ber that the only API we need is HTML/HTTP — play in their gar­dens (walled or oth­er­wise) but live on the Web.

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