The Social and Technological Web Evolution of the Web over time A timeline for the Social Web A categorization of Social Web Technologies underlying Social Web Problems in Social Web Trends for the future

Tim Berners Lee’s WWW HTML + HTTP + URL  Creation of WWW The first web server: info.cern.ch, on November 1990 Several efforts to write platform-independent browsers Efforts to achieve standard protocols First WWW conference in 1994 Mosaic Netscape released on October 1994 The innocence of the Web finished with the entry into scene of Netscape. In these early years, Web was about looking up information compiled in lists of URLs. The Informational Web

The dotcom Rise and Decline Netscape develops Secure Sockets Layer Protocol (SSL) which opens the door for financial transactions over the Web. 1995 – 2001, a creation of countless start-ups that wanted to become rich by using the Web (by building brands). eBay (1995) Amazon (1995) The bursting of “Dot-com bubble” was somehow similar to the current bursting of the “Housing bubble”. Takis might want to pitch in some story about that era. January 30 2000: More than 20 dot.coms. including Pets.com and Epidemic.com, pay up to $3m each for 30-second TV advertising spots at American football Super Bowl match. March 10 2000: Nasdaq reaches all-time closing high of 5.048.62. November 2000: Pets.com become first listed US dot.com to collapse. Other notable failures that month included Garden.com and Furniture.com. 21 September 2001: Nasdaq hits 1,423.19 Why did the commercial Web failed? Paul Graham thinks because the startups were headed by MBA-s that were using the business models of old mediums in a new medium. The commercial Web

The Social Web The Web not only as a marketplace for companies that want to sell, but as a social space for people. In this social space, by sharing news, ideas, information, stories, etc., communities of like-minded individuals are created. The Web as a publishing medium: everyone is an author. The Web as a medium to harness “the wisdom of crowds”. Google was the first one to recognize the “wisdom of the crowds” by taping into the link structure of the Web and the value of the anchor text. The participatory Web

Timeline of Social Web December 1997: the word ‘Weblog’ was coined by Jorn Barger. In 1998, the word was pronounced “We blog” and shortened to “Blog”. End of 1998 – 1999: Creation of several hosting services for blogs: OpenDiary, LiveJournal, Blogger. January 2001: The launch of Wikipedia August 2003: The launch of MySpace February 2004: The launch of Flickr December 2004: The launch of Digg February 2005: The launch of YouTube Web 2.0 is a term created in a brainstorm session at O’Reilly in 2004. It is more a marketing term, to make the Web appealing again to investors. log: a record of performance, events, or day-to-day activities (it is used in ships, aircrafts) What is common of all these events, is that the startups behind them emerged differently from the dotcom companies.

Categories of Social Web Blogging Social Networking (MySpace, Facebook) Collaborative Knowledge Creation (Wikipedia) Content Sharing (Flickr, YouTube) Social Bookmarking (Digg, Del.icio.us) Recommendation Engines (Amazon, Netflix, Last.fm) Social Gaming Open-source software (Linux, Apache, Python, etc.) The more people participate, the better (and sometimes more valuable) a platform becomes. None of these would be interesting without massive user-generated content.

Blogging Transition from personal websites to blogs. RSS (also known as Web feeds) Really Simple Syndication (Dave Winner) Rich Site Summary (Netscape) Subscribe to one page and get notified when the page changes. Permalinks Trackbacks Free blog hosting services (Blogger, WordPress): Templating (no need to write HTML) rich editing (WYSIWYG) adding photos, music, video (the widget technology) Blogs make conversations possible. RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's "Really Simple Syndication" technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's "Rich Site Summary", which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows. RSS feeds can be read using software called an "RSS reader", "feed reader", or "aggregator", which can be web-based or desktop-based. First, because search engines use link structure to help predict useful pages, bloggers, as the most prolific and timely linkers, have a disproportionate role in shaping search engine results. Second, because the blogging community is so highly self-referential, bloggers paying attention to other bloggers magnifies their visibility and power. The "echo chamber" that critics decry is also an amplifier. ASK students if they ever used RSS feeds. If not, show them part of the short video: http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english

Social Networking MySpace 246.000.000 (users) Facebook 124.000.000 Windows Live Spaces 120.000.000 Friendster (80 M), hi5 (80 M), Tagged (80 M), Orkut (67 M), Bebo (40 M), LinkedIn (30 M) comScore MediaMetrix (August 2008) Blogs: 77.7 million unique visitors in the US Facebook: 41.0 million | MySpace 75.1 million Total internet audience (US) 188.9 million Discuss the fact that these numbers: show registered not active users. Might be inaccurate, because some companies lie Many users have accounts in several networks Different networks are popular in different countries A better measure of popularity is the daily/monthly traffic, not the number of users MySpace was sold for 560 Million to Murdoch’s company. SAY that Social Networks with be discussed in the next lecture. LinkedIn launched in March 2003

Collaborative Knowledge Creation Examples: Wikipedia, WikiTravel, Wiktionary Technology: wiki – a page that can be modified by anyone, using just a web browser. wiki has been around since 1995 There are public and private Wikis. Problems: Bias, accuracy, vandalism Wikipedia ranks 8th in terms of global web traffic. Remember the Tim Berner’s Lee wanted a browser that could do editing of web pages. It turned out, not the browser, but a web-application served by an application server could do such a thing.

Content Sharing Examples: Flickr, YouTube, Picassa Content (videos, photos) is uploaded from users and made available to all. Everyone can tag and comment on the content. Tags can be used for retrieval of content. Content can be embedded in other social sites through feeds or widgets. YouTube is ranked 3rd (after Yahoo and Google) in terms of traffic ranking. Examples of Widgets: clocks, event countdowns, auction-tickers, stock market tickers, flight arrival information, daily weather etc Widget – a separate block of code that can be executed within a HTML page. It is written in Javascript, Adode Flash, or DHTML.

Social Bookmarking Examples: Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon Tags Folksonomy versus Taxonomy Thumbs-up, thumbs-down (a voting system) Features like “most e-mailed”, “most read” (in all other sites) Risks: Users who promote sites that promote products and services The cascade process of reinforcement Del.icio.us is free technology for saving and sharing bookmarks that are viewable to the general public. Slashdot – predecessor of Digg or StumbleUpon Here we so the “wisdom of crowd” in action.

Social Gaming One of the first uses of Internet, well before Web 2.0. Origin: Text-driven MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) (played by telnet) Viral games: “Zombies”, “Vampires”, “Werewolfes” Virtual Life (a social virtual world) Google Lively Facebook games: Who has the biggest brain? Scrabulous Games in other platforms (Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo) with Internet connection. Top 10 Games in Facebook: (source Forbes.com) (Lil) Green Patch, Owned, Texas Hold’em Poker, Friends for Sale, Mob Wars, Biggest Brain, Compare People, Bowling Buddies, Word Challenge, Pokey.

Recommendation Engines Examples: Amazon, Netflix, Last.fm Personalized recommendation: recommend things based on the individual’s paste behavior Social recommendation: recommend things based on the past behavior of similar users Item recommendation: recommend things based on the item itself Amazon was able to overcome the dotcome crash, because it created user-generated content (ratings and text evaluations of products from customers) Slide source: ReadWriteWeb

Open-source Software Many Social Web apps are built on the Lamp architecture: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP All these building blocks are open-source software The roots are on the GNU Project, started from Richard Stallman on 1983 (founder of Free Software Foundation) SourceForge – a location to store open-source software (180.000 projects, 1.9 Million contributors)

Other categories in the Social Web Podcasting Microblogging (Twitter) Live or on-demand streaming of TV shows, concerts, events, sport, etc. Chatrooms, Instant Messagging, Internet Telephonie Online communities (Craiglist) Social event calendars (Upcoming, Eventful) Coordination of offline activities (Meetup)

Technologies Editing within the browser Tagging XML, AJAX, Javascript, RSS, ATOM, Web Services, REST Advertising (e.g., AdSense, AdWords) Web Applications (Google Mail, Docs, Calendar, Maps, Earth, Picassa,) [Rich User Experience] Open APIs where users can plug-in their applications Mashups Increased scalability (computing utilities) XML – eXtended Markup Language AJAX – Asynchronous Javascript and XML RSS = Really Simple Syndication ATOM = a rival format to RSS REST = Representational State Transfer

Financing models Serving advertisement Ads are the first deployed web services Ads are the first mashups DoubleClick (old model) vs. Overture (Yahoo), Google (new models) DoubleClick serves advertising agencies and media companies Overture, Google serve the “long tail”, offering the possibility to bid for search queries. Voluntary donations (Wikipedia) Many of the social websites do not sell stuff, as websites of the dotcom era did. So, how they survive?

Problems in the Social Web Copyright infringement (e.g. Napster, BitTorrent) Privacy Over-sharing details of personal life (“Facebook Sabotage”) Content Quality Identity (PayPal, Amazon versus MySpace) OpenID platform Trust Who owns the data? One drawback of Facebook is that you don't have the option of approving the photos that others tag you in. [Don’t say, see if the students will see it as Facebook problem in HW2] Viral marketing issue (especially getting all your contacts in the email address and mailing them invitations)

Trends for the future Web computing replaces Desktop computing Semantic Web Harnessing and integrating services provided by others Software written for several platforms (Google and Apple on the mobile telephony, Microsoft on Xbox, Netflix + TiVo) Look at Best 100 Web Applications at Webware.com

Where to learn more Tim O’reilly article: “What Is Web 2.0” 09/30/2005 Paul Graham article: “Web 2.0”, November 2005 TechMeme Leaderboard (a ranking of most read technology blogs and websites) Blogs like: TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb Wikipedia entries Web 2.0 Summit, Web 2.0 Expo