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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 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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