1 Web 2.0: Introduction Hsinchun Chen February 2009

2 Overview What is Web 2.0? By Tim O’Reilly Web 2.0, Wikipedia The Long Tail, By Chris Anderson

3 Web 2.0, by O’Reilly “What is Web 2.0? Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software,” by Tim O’Reilly, 9/30/2005 (O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 Conference, 2004) Examples of Web 2.0: Google AdSense, Flikr, Napster, Wikipedia, blogging, search engine optimization, web services, participation, tagging (folksonomy), syndication, etc.

4 Web 2.0, by O’Reilly Strategic positioning: “The Web as Platform” User positioning: “You control your own data” Core competencies: –Services, not packageg software –Architecture of participation –Cost-effective scalability –Remixable data sources and data transformations –Software above the level of a single device –Harnessing collective intelligence

5 Web 2.0 Lessons The value of the software is proportional to the scale and dynamism of the data it helps to manage. Leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head. The service automatically gets better the more people use it. Blogging and the wisdom of the crowds. Network effects from user participation are the key to market dominance in the Web 2.0 era. We, the media. Data is the next Intel inside.

6 Web 2.0 Lessons (cont’d) Operations must become a core competency. The perpeptual beta. Support lightweight programming models that allow for loosely coupled systems. (SOAP, REST, AJAX, etc.) Think syndication, not coordination. Innovation in assembly. The Mashups. Design for “hackability” and remixability. Some rights reserved.

7 Web 2.0, Wikipedia “Web 2.0 is a trend in the use of the WWW technology and web design that aims to facilitate creativity, information sharing, and collaboration among users.” “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.”

8 Web 2.0 Characteristics Rich user experience User participation Dynamic content Metadata Web standards and scalability Openness Freedom Collective intelligence

9 Web 2.0 Features/Technologies Technological infrastructure: server software, content syndication, messaging protocols, browsers with plug-ins and extensions, various client applications. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to separate presentation from content Folksonomy (collective tagging) Microformats extending pages with semantics REST, XML, JSON based APIs Rich Internet application techniques based on AJAX RSS or Atom feeds for syndication and notification of data Mashups of content from different sources Weblog publishing, and wikis

10 The Long Tail “The Long Tail,” by Chris Anderson, WIRED Magazine, December “Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainments is in the millions on niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.”

11 The Long Tail (cont’d) If the 20th- century entertainment industry was about hits, the 21st will be equally about misses. The constraint of the physical world is physics itself. In the tyranny of physical space, an audience too thinly spread is the same as no audience at all. "What percentage of the top 10,000 titles in any online media store (Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, or any other) will rent or sell at least once a month?“

12 The Long Tail (cont’d) The Power Law demand curve – the long tail

13 The Long Tail (cont’d) Executives at iTunes, Amazon, and Netflix have discovered that the "misses" usually make money, too. And because there are so many more of them, that money can add up quickly to a huge new market. Combine enough nonhits on the Long Tail and you've got a market bigger than the hits. The average Blockbuster carries fewer than 3,000 DVDs. Yet a fifth of Netflix rentals are outside its top 3,000 titles. Google makes most of its money off small advertisers (the long tail of advertising) and eBay is mostly tail as well - niche and one-off products.

14 The Long Tail: Three Rules Rule 1: Make everything available In a Long Tail economy, it's more expensive to evaluate than to release. Just do it! Rule 2: Cut the price in half. Now lower it. Pull consumers down the tail with lower prices. Rule 3: Help me find it Use recommendations to drive demand down the Long Tail.

15 Web 2.0 Criticism “Web 2.0 as a piece of jargon,” by Tim Berners-Lee “A second bubble” “Bubble 2.0” “A mere augmentation of current cultural information exchanges that are bound by existing political and societal structures.”